ChatGPT went down for the second time today due to a major OpenAI outage, but it's finally back up and running. The artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has become a major productivity tool for many users. As the US began the workday this morning, many users could not access it from 10:30 a.m. through 1:17 p.m. ET. 

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At that time, OpenAI updated its status page to report the outage's resolution:

"Resolved - We experienced a major outage impacting all users on all plans of ChatGPT. The impact included all ChatGPT-related services. The impact did not include platform.openai.com or the API. This incident started June 4th at 2:15p GMT and was resolved June 4th at 5:01p GMT."

Before then, OpenAI had recommended ChatGPT users perform a hard refresh by clearing their browser cache before reopening the AI chatbot. 

OpenAI reported its first major outage of the day this morning, which began around 2:30 a.m. ET. Five hours later, the company pushed out a fix, resolving the issue. Not everyone was affected, however, as reports say it appears to have affected mostly logged-in users. The outage was widespread, affecting the web version and the mobile and Mac apps.

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If you find yourself looking for AI chatbots alternative to ChatGPT in the event of another outage, here are a few you can try:

• Microsoft Copilot: Touted as the best ChatGPT alternative, Copilot is accessible online and can access internet sources. Copilot also uses GPT-4, which is OpenAI's LLM but isn't down now.
• Gemini: This is a good opportunity if you haven't tried Google's chatbot yet. This free AI chatbot has access to Google and replies quickly.
• You.com: This AI bot lets you use to the most advanced LLMs, including GPT-4, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3, and Claude 3 Opus, and is available for free with web access.

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