The increased demand for ghibli images caused a general, though temporary, outage in OpenAI’s ChatGPT; on March 30th, 2025, users worldwide reported not being able to log in or create responses across the platform.
It seemed the problem had cropped up about noon, with Downdetector showing more than 500 user reports of disruptions.
While the company OpenAI did not immediately confirm what was causing the problem, it soon cited “elevated errors” across services including ChatGPT, Sora, Labs and Playground. “We are currently experiencing a downtime,” the company confirmed on its official status page, adding that mitigation is underway:
The crash came amid a huge spike in usage, partly driven by a viral feature enabled through the GPT-4o model that allowed users to generate Studio Ghibli-esque avatars. As per OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the popularity of such highly stylized images overwhelmed the server capacity, especially the GPU load.
“Our GPUs got crushed,” Altman tweeted. “We’re adding temporary rate limits to stabilize the platform while scaling up. Should be short-term.”
Within hours, the memes and reactions took over social media. One chimed in with, “How do I explain to my professor that I couldn’t submit my paper because ChatGPT is down?” Others spoke of dependence on OpenAI while a few made light of the AI’s apparent new fame as an image generator over a chatbot.
After the services went down due to demand for Ghibli-style images, it took OpenAI about 30–45 minutes to restore them and verify that all its services were working at full capacity. The company said it would publish a Root Cause Analysis in detail within five business days, continuing transparency into how it intends to avoid such instances going forward.
The incident represents a growing pain for AI platforms: how to balance viral features with infrastructure limits. As users increasingly depend on the tools at work, school, and creative projects, even short-term outages could have ripple effects across a number of industries.
Until then, ChatGPT is back online, and yes, the Ghibli avatars still are going strong.
- GTA 6 Release Date Glitch Sparks Chaos on PlayStation Store - July 29, 2025
- Claude’s Blog Experiment Ends Before It Took Off - June 12, 2025
- Call of Duty Black Ops 7 Leaps Into 2035 With a Dark New Twist - June 12, 2025
