How to access ChatGPT when the web and mobile interfaces are down: A shockingly simple workaround.

If you are one of the millions of users who have come to rely on ChatGPT, the popular chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 engine, you might have noticed that the web and mobile interfaces are not working right now (August 29, 2023). This is a disastrous turn of events for people who have come to depend on the AI’s help for various tasks, such as writing, editing, researching, coding, and more. It is especially painful for those who have paid for the ChatGPT Plus tier to get access to the GPT-4 engine, which offers more features and capabilities than the free GPT-3.5 version.

What happened?

According to OpenAI, the ChatGPT web and mobile interfaces are experiencing a “temporary outage” due to a “technical issue” that they are working hard to resolve. They have not provided any details on what caused the issue, how long it will take to fix it, or whether there will be any compensation for the affected users. They have only posted an orange alert box floating near the top of the chat window saying “ChatGPT web & mobile UIs unavailable” with some text beneath it saying “Investigating – We are currently investigating this issue.” Here is a screenshot of the alert box:

How does this affect you?

If you are using ChatGPT through the web or mobile interfaces, you will not be able to access the chatbot until the issue is resolved. You will not be able to start new conversations, resume existing ones, or use any of the features that ChatGPT offers. You will also not be able to manage your account settings, such as changing your password, updating your payment information, or canceling your subscription.

One of the unexpected downsides is that we have no access to our ChatGPT History. This is something that OpenAI should strongly think of addressing for future outages – we definitely need access to our historical chats, even if we can not progress them, the data could be important to users.

If you are using ChatGPT through other platforms or integrations, such as Slack, Discord, Telegram, or WordPress, you might still be able to use the chatbot, but with limited functionality and performance. OpenAI has not confirmed whether these platforms or integrations are affected by the outage or not.

What can you do?

While there is no “official” workaround or solution for this problem, there is one thing that you can do to cope with the situation:

• Use the playground instance of ChatGPT accessible at this link . This is a free and experimental version of ChatGPT that allows you to interact with the chatbot. However, it has some limitations and drawbacks compared to the web and mobile interfaces. For example:
  • It does not save your conversations or history.
  • It does not allow you to customize your chat settings or preferences.
  • It does not support any integrations with other platforms or services.
  • It may have lower performance or reliability than the web and mobile interfaces.
  • It uses a different engine (GPT-3.5) than the web and mobile interfaces (GPT-4), which means that it may have different responses or capabilities.

We hope that this blog post has helped you understand what is going on with ChatGPT and what you can do about it. We also hope that OpenAI will fix the issue as soon as possible and restore their service to normal. ChatGPT is an amazing chatbot that has helped many people with various tasks and goals, and we look forward to using it again soon.