ChatGPT Becomes Part of Daily Life... Outages Impact Both Office Workers and University Students

"Compensation or Alternatives Should Be Provided When Errors Occur"

"It felt as if the servers of KakaoTalk or Naver had gone down."

Kim, a 22-year-old student at Kookmin University, could not hide his confusion on the evening of the 10th when OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT became unavailable due to an error. Kim, who regularly used ChatGPT for his studies, found the connection failure during final exam season to be a critical inconvenience. He said, "I would review what I learned in class by asking ChatGPT again, and I studied by solving problems it generated," adding, "I wanted to organize key concepts before the exam, but the sudden disconnection left me flustered."

Hwang Kyunghoon, a 29-year-old university student, had a similar experience. Whenever he encountered sentences in English-language textbooks that he could not understand despite multiple readings, he would turn to ChatGPT for help. Hwang said, "When it suddenly stopped working last night, I was in a total panic," and added, "I even considered whether I should use another app like Gemini."

On the 10th, users experienced inconvenience due to an error with ChatGPT.

We now live in an era where using AI chatbots for academic or professional purposes is completely natural. With so many users relying on ChatGPT, its outage caused disruptions in daily life.

Actual user statistics support this. According to WiseApp Retail, an app and retail analytics platform, as of May, ChatGPT was the most widely used generative AI app among Koreans. During that period, ChatGPT's monthly active users (MAU) reached 17.71 million. This figure is overwhelmingly higher than the 2.56 million of RYUTEN (RyuTen), which ranked second, and the 1.51 million of Perplexity, which ranked third.

ChatGPT is used not only for simple searches but also as a "digital tutor" for studying and work. Its capabilities include summarizing, explaining concepts, generating problems, and providing advanced questions, making it an essential app for university students preparing for exams at the end of the semester.

Korea also has the second-highest proportion of paid ChatGPT subscribers in the world, following the United States. Although the paid plan, "ChatGPT Plus," costs $20 (about 27,000 KRW) per month, users subscribe to access faster response speeds and the latest model (GPT-4o).

Given such a high usage rate, ChatGPT's errors affected not only students but also working professionals. Jang, a 30-year-old labor attorney at a law firm in Seoul, said, "I urgently needed to draft a document for a client, and I tried to have ChatGPT write a draft as usual, but the connection was down, which left me at a loss." He added, "I ended up using Perplexity for the task." He continued, "I'm even paying for the premium version, so if such errors occur, I hope OpenAI provides a clear explanation of the cause and their countermeasures."

OpenAI Apology Statement. Email Capture

On the morning of the 10th (local time) in the United States, where OpenAI's servers are located, thousands of outage reports were submitted worldwide on monitoring sites such as Downdetector. Afterwards, ChatGPT sent an email to users stating, "There was a temporary increase in errors due to a system update," and added, "For paid users, we will provide additional information regarding compensation by early July."

Experts warn that although ChatGPT currently holds an unrivaled top position in the domestic generative AI market, repeated errors like this could lead to user attrition. Jeon Hokyum, a subscription economy expert and professor at Seoul School of Venture Studies, said, "ChatGPT is not an app based on network effects among users like KakaoTalk, so if a competitor offers better features and reasonable prices, users can switch at any time." He pointed out, "Especially in the Korean market, where the proportion of paid users is high, it is even more important to provide compensation systems or alternatives when errors occur."