Is ChatGPT down? Here's what to use instead for free

On Tuesday, June 10, 2025, users around the world lost access to ChatGPT: the bot either did not open dialogues or responded with a noticeable delay. At the same time, the Sora video generator and other OpenAI services were also affected by the outage.

The Novyny.LIVE website tells about the outage and what free alternatives to ChatGPT are available.

Causes of the ChatGPT outage

Downdetector recorded the peak of complaints around 10:00 Kyiv time, after which OpenAI marked "Elevated error rates" in ChatGPT, Sora, and API on its monitoring page. Despite the partial restoration, the company is still working on fixing the problem and does not give an estimated time for a full launch.

Users who manage to log in report significantly slower responses, while others receive an error as early as the chat is loading. Perplexity AI, which partially relies on OpenAI models, is also experiencing outages, as it also reports "slower and higher error rates".

Such a large-scale incident last occurred on January 23, 2025, when elevated errors on the ChatGPT web version lasted almost three hours.

What are the free alternatives to ChatGPT?

While OpenAI specialists are investigating the reasons, many users are looking for a backup tool to work with generative AI. Solutions from various companies are already available on the market.

Among the best alternatives:

• Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet scores higher on several logical reasoning and coding tests, and offers a faster Claude Haiku mode.
• Google is developing Gemini 2.5 Pro with a "Live" mode that works with a smartphone's camera and on-screen content, and recently added a "scheduled actions" feature for scheduling tasks.
• Microsoft Copilot has just launched experimental Copilot Actions, which can book hotels or order flowers without having to navigate between sites.

Pay attention to the alternatives — they can, at least temporarily, cover you during ChatGPT downtime.

As a reminder, users of the Gemini app can now instruct it to perform routine actions at a certain time, allowing the service to proactively take care of some of their daily tasks. The new feature is a logical extension of the promises made at the I/O Conference.

We also wrote that Google introduced AI Edge Gallery, the application that allows running AI models without the Internet directly on smartphones. The new tool is already available on Google Play for Android and will soon be available on iOS.