ChatGPT and Google Gemini experienced widespread service disruptions on December 2, leaving thousands of users unable to access the competing AI chatbots as technical issues cascaded across both platforms.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffered two distinct outage waves, beginning at around 2:30 PM Eastern Time on Tuesday, according to CNBC. The company later attributed the disruption to “a routing misconfiguration”. A subsequent overnight incident was more severe, with Downdetector recording more than 41,000 user reports at its peak.
Many ChatGPT users encountered error messages stating “unusual activity has been detected,” while others reported timeouts, lag, and frozen interfaces. OpenAI’s status page cited “elevated errors for the impacted services” and said engineers were rolling out mitigation steps.
The instability followed an internal “code red” memo from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, directing staff to elevate work on ChatGPT above other efforts, including advertising and AI agent projects. The directive, reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Information, focused on boosting the chatbot’s speed, reliability, and personalization as Google’s Gemini intensifies competition.
Google Gemini also faced service issues on December 2, with users in multiple countries flagging errors and connection problems. While Google has not released a formal explanation, outage monitoring services logged reports from users in the United States, Canada, France, Turkey, and additional markets.
The twin disruptions hit two of the world’s most widely used AI platforms. ChatGPT serves over 800 million weekly active users according to OpenAI, while Gemini reached 650 million monthly active users in October.
OpenAI announced Tuesday evening that issues had been resolved
