ChatGPT back online in UAE

After hours of outage, AI chatbot ChatGPT is finally back online. Prompts sent to the bot in the UAE were responded to immediately.

The problem was resolved after ChatGPT owner OpenAI said it had identified the cause of the global outage that affected millions of users.

"We have identified the root cause for the issue causing elevated errors and latency across the listed services. We are working on implementing a mitigation," the company said earlier in a statement.

The artificial intelligence chatbot was down across several parts of the world, including in the UAE, since early Tuesday.

“Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate this issue,” the company said in a statement earlier.

The outage affected not only the chatbot but also Sora, OpenAI’s video generation model, as well as APIs.

The outage was spread across several devices and operating systems, the company added.

OpenAI’s weekly active users jumped 33 percent to 400 million in February since December last year, the company said earlier.

The San Francisco-based company also reported that its enterprise customer base has doubled to two million paying users since September, highlighting rapid adoption of AI tools across the business sector.

The company, which rocked the tech world with its release of its chatbot in 2022, however did not update the latest data for its Plus and Pro offerings, which charge customers $20 and $200 respectively.

Earlier this week, OpenAI said it now has three million paying business users of ChatGPT, up from two million announced in February earlier this year.

The milestone reflects increasing demand for ChatGPT products as more businesses seek AI that enables them to work more productively, efficiently, and strategically, said the company.

Yesterday, Apple announced an expanded relationship with OpenAI, which first teamed up with the iPhone maker last year, and underpins many of the new capabilities that are coming to iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 and visionOS 26 this fall.

The announcement came as Apple introduced a number of AI-powered features during the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday