OpenAI's popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has been hit by a fresh service disruption, leaving users in the US, India and other regions unable to generate AI images. Hundreds of users flagged the problem on outage tracker Downdetector, reporting errors while creating images and, in some cases, accessing ChatGPT.

The outage prompted a wave of complaints on social media, where users questioned whether the issue was widespread.

One X user wrote, "ChatGPT showing errors generating images. does this mean a reset?"

Another user posted, "ChatGPT's image generation is throwing errors left and right, but is everyone else getting that too...? Or is it just me...?"

Responding to the complaints, OpenAI acknowledged the issue in a post on X (formerly Twitter) and apologised to users. "We know that a lot of you are having issues generating images in ChatGPT, and we're working fast to fix it. Sorry about that," the company said.

According to OpenAI's status page, the company has identified the root cause of the disruption and is implementing a mitigation.

The status page currently describes the incident as "Image generation unavailable in ChatGPT" with degraded performance, adding: "We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation."

The latest disruption comes just two days after another major ChatGPT outage on July 25, making it the second incident in a short span.

During the previous outage, Downdetector recorded thousands of complaints from users across multiple countries.

In the United States, more than 3,200 reports were logged, with around 80% of users reporting problems with the web version of ChatGPT. Another 8% reported issues with the mobile app, while a similar percentage cited problems with Codex.

The United Kingdom saw over 3,000 outage reports, particularly from London and Southampton.

India recorded nearly 1,500 complaints, with close to 80% of affected users reporting issues with the web interface.

During the earlier outage, both free and paid ChatGPT subscribers reported a range of issues, including:

• AI image generation failures
• Blank loading screens
• Unexpected logouts during conversations
• "Service unavailable" error messages when submitting prompts

At the time, OpenAI said it had applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery.

The company stated: "We're currently experiencing issues... We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery."

With the latest disruption, OpenAI says it has already identified the cause of the AI image generation problem and is working to restore normal service as quickly as possible.