ChatGPT breaks down days after Sam Altman warned people to stop using new feature

Well, we can't say Sam Altman didn't warn you. While creating all those cute Studio Ghibli-inspired avatars was fun for a while, it seems that karma has hit ChatGPT after the legendary Hayao Miyazaki previously branded the idea of using artificial intelligence to make art as 'disgusting'. We were told that ChatGPT's servers were struggling to keep up with demand, and apparently, it's led to a global outage.

As the race between Grok and ChatGPT continues to heat up (like the latter's GPUs), Sam Altman warned against using ChatGPT's new AI image generation feature. The rollout of ChatGPT's GPT-4o model on March 25 was originally praised as a marked improvement over what was previously on offer, and with ChatGPT landing 1,000,000 new users in just an hour, it looked like Altman was going to reap the rewards.

Sadly, ChatGPT got too big for its boots and soon went kaput. Wannabe Ghibli artists were greeted by a message saying "something went wrong" and were advised to refresh the page...to no avail.

Downdetector revealed a massive spike in reports against OpenAI in the USA and UK, starting at around 09:00 am ET. A look back at previous days shows this time is a common issue, suggesting it's simply putting strain on ChatGPT at busy times.

The OpenAI status page confirmed 'increased error rates', 'degraded performance', and 'login issues'. If not being hit with laggy performance, there are whole outages.

Altman took to X and addressed these teething problems as he told disgruntled users: "We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from openai to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges."

ChatGPT has just closed a $40 billion round of funding, which is the largest private tech deal on record. Considering the bank accounts should be booming, the current issues were too much for many, who vented their frustrations and asked what they're paying for.

One angry user said: "Why did you roll out image generation to free users if you don't have the capacity and you are compromising the service for paying customers?"

Another added: "Have you considered removing the free tier? At this point, it’s despicable that pro users are subsidizing free users while nothing works for us."

Someone else concluded: "Excuses. How can you have this when you just received $40B - where is the money going to if not servers? Just makes more sense now why people need to install a local version of a competitor LLM like @deepseek_ai."

ChatGPT is back up and running at the time of writing, but with fears that this will keep happening as you flock to generate your own AI artworks, Altman continues to come under fire.