ChatNot ChatGPT went down on Wednesday morning — and the timing of its outage couldn’t have been more unfortunate. While OpenAI’s world-beating chatbot suffered its second major outage in as many weeks, big tech executives were convening in Washington to plead their case to lawmakers over the future of AI. Among several notable figures in attendance was Sam Altman, CEO of the AI startup — who probably hoped to put on a better face amidst increased scrutiny over ChatGPT’s falling user traffic for the past several months. According to OpenAI’s status page, the issue, described as “elevated error rates and increased latency,” was being investigated starting at around 9am EST. Then, about an hour later, an update acknowledged an “outage for most conversations with ChatGPT.” It would take nearly two hours since the troubleshooting began before the incident was declared “resolved” — a hefty length of time for any site to go down, nevermind with Congress looking to you as an industry leader. Outage House Needless to say, it’s not the best look for the world’s (diminishingly) hottest AI product, especially since these outages have apparently spiked in frequency over the past few weeks. The last outage of note occurred on August 31, during which the service “severely degraded.” But only two days before that, ChatGPT had suffered yet another “major outage,” which blocked users from accessing the web UI entirely. To add to OpenAI’s worries, the chatbot continues to bleed users for the third month in a row, after reporting…ChatGPT Goes Down Right as Sam Altman Defends It in Washington