Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET If you're running into problems with ChatGPT this morning, you're not alone. Just after 8:30 a.m. ET, reports began surfacing that paid users were experiencing quite a few errors when trying to converse with the chatbot. In some cases, ChatGPT responds with an error message; in others, it doesn't respond at all. OpenAI confirmed the issue The outage‑tracking website DownDetector showed a spike in reports about that time. Reports were declining but still present by 9:45 a.m. ET. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems. Ziff Davis also owns DownDetector.) Also: My 8 ChatGPT Agent tests produced only 1 near-perfect result - and a lot of alternative facts OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page, saying there were "Elevated errors on ChatGPT for all paid users." It added that it was working on mitigation. At the time of this writing, the issues had persisted for about 90 minutes. The status page noted that the "Conversations" component was experiencing the most elevated error rates. Only happening for paid users OpenAI hasn't pinpointed a cause, but it is interesting the problems are only happening for paid users. The company rolled out ChatGPT Agent, which can handle complex tasks from start to finish, like scheduling an appointment for you or updating a spreadsheet with new data, to $200 a month Pro subscribers last week and to $20 a month Plus users today. This means there's a good chance paid users are rushing to test out the new feature this morning, putting a little more strain than usual on systems. Also: How ChatGPT actually works (and why it's been so game-changing) The AI tool experienced a 15‑hour outage last month. This present issue doesn't seem as widespread, but it's still fairly frustrating for affected users. OpenAI's other services, like Playground, Sora, and APIs, weren't experiencing any trouble. Since the company is aware of the error and actively working on a fix, the errors hopefully shouldn't last too much longer. Want more stories about AI? Sign up for Innovation, our weekly newsletter.