Eyebrow-Raising Bug Shuts ChatGPT Down for Day

If you were playing around in ChatGPT on Monday before it experienced a major outage, you may have noticed something unusual in your user-history sidebar on the left of your webpage: the titles of a complete stranger's chats. That's exactly why OpenAI temporarily shuttered the artificial intelligence-driven chatbot after getting wind of the glitch, though a company spokesperson assures Bloomberg that users could only see the titles of others' conversations, not the conversations themselves.

Mashable reports that, before the outage, users had started posting about the bug on Reddit and Twitter. "Has ChatGPT or me been hacked?" one commenter wrote, while another noted of the exposed chat titles: "Good thing they don't open." It's not yet clear what caused the bug in the open-source software used by OpenAI. According to the company, ChatGPT was fully up and running again by Monday evening, though it noted, "We're continuing to work to restore past conversation history to users." (More ChatGPT stories.)