ChatGPT is offline, leaving users unable to talk to the AI chat app.

Visitors to the website saw an error page rather than the usual chat options, and official apps and other integrations with ChatGPT also appeared to be broken.

The official status page of OpenAI, which makes the service, said that it was seeing “elevated error rates” and that it was investigating the issue.

Tracking website Down Detector saw a huge surge in complaints about problems at around noon UK time, or 7am eastern. The timing meant that many took to other platforms to complain that they had been left unable to use a tool that was central to their work or study.

“chatgpt down in the middle of the workday i’m about to get fired pray for me,” wrote on user on X, alongside other complaints from people who said they were in the middle of coding or writing essays and now had to do the work themselves.

ChatGPT now has more than 300 million people using it each week, OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman announced late last year. Users send more than a billion messages each day to the system, he said.

The app was initially launched in 2022, and very quickly went onto become the fastest-growing launch ever. Since then, OpenAI has added new features and systems as well as looking to monetise it with paid access to better capabilities.

ChatGPT has also been integrated into a range of other systems through its API, and OpenAI says that more than 1.3 million developers have built on the system in the US. The outage also appeared to take down those third-party integrations.