OpenAI has seen tremendous growth in interest among both commercial and consumer users. The service ChatGPT is now consuming a substantial amount of computing power.
Alongside this growth, OpenAI has seen occasional issues with reliability and uptime. If you’re using the OpenAI Playground, an API for a service like GPT-3 or DALL-E, or even the ChatGPT system, you might notice that you get an error message or certain requests don’t go through.
There is an easy way to check the current status of OpenAI, to confirm that the issue is on their side and not a problem with your prompt or your API integration. To check the status of OpenAI, simply head to the OpenAI status page.
Using the OpenAI Status Page
The page provides a variety of useful information. For one thing, it will tell you whether there’s been an outage in any of the core OpenAI services.
The status dashboard breaks down app, time, and status both for the API and Playground. The Playground is the interface many people use to interact with OpenAI services manually. The API is the system that developers use to integrate their own applications with OpenAI.
If you’re writing Python or other software and it has trouble working with OpenAI, check the status page to see if there’s an issue with the API. On the other hand, if you’re writing prompts directly to ChatGPT or GPT-3, you’ll want to look at the Playground status.
On the status page, you can also see whether there have been any outages over the last 30 days. If you notice some strange behavior a couple of days ago, you can see not only whether there was an issue with the service but also what that issue was.
Accessing Incident Reports
OpenAI generally publishes fairly descriptive incident reports that can help you identify when something has gone wrong and what that something might be. For example, as we write this, a recent status report shares specific details on problems with one of OpenAI’s completion models.
Overall, the status page shows that OpenAI has excellent uptime and reliability. As we write this, the uptime exceeded 99.9% for both the API and the Playground. Given the tremendous load OpenAI servers must be under, that’s a solid uptime percentage.
Conclusion
The next time you try to use the OpenAI Playground or integrate with the API and find that you got an error message or your prompt doesn’t go as planned, head over to the OpenAI status page to see if there’s an issue with the service.
If you know the problem is not on your side, that can save you a lot of headaches and debugging time!