OpenAI had restored its ChatGPT Wednesday (June 5) following a “major” outage the prior day.
As Tom’s Guide noted in a report Wednesday, while ChatGPT will sometimes have minor outages when generating text or images, this was the first significant outage for the artificial intelligence (AI) company’s flagship product in some time.
“We experienced a major outage impacting all users on all plans of ChatGPT,” the company told users Tuesday (June 4), per the report. “The impact included all ChatGPT related services. The impact did not include platform.openai.com or the API. This incident started June 4th at 2:15p GMT and was resolved June 4th at 5:01p GMT.”
According to the report, ChatGPT went down for some users for more than four hours Tuesday, came back online, then crashed again. The company is recommending anyone having problems with the service on either desktop or mobile to implement a hard refresh.
Meanwhile, this week saw a group of current and former employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind sign a public letter calling for protection from retaliation when sharing concerns about the “serious risks” associated with these companies’ AI products.
In the letter, titled “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” the employees express concerns about the lack of effective oversight of leading AI companies, arguing that these corporations have strong financial incentives to skirt proper scrutiny.
The letter also argues that while ordinary whistleblower protections focus on illegal activities, many of the risks associated with AI technologies are still unregulated. This gap leaves employees as one of the few groups that can hold these companies accountable.
Elsewhere on the AI front, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is set to caution financial institutions about risks associated with the use of the technology.
While AI is already used in the financial services space for forecasting, fraud prevention, customer support and other uses, its rapid evolution presents risks and opportunities, Yellen is expected say in a speech to be delivered Thursday (June 6) at the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s 2024 Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Financial Stability.
“Specific vulnerabilities may arise from the complexity and opacity of AI models; inadequate risk management frameworks to account for AI risks; and interconnections that emerge as many market participants rely on the same data and models,” Yellen said in excerpts of the speech provided to PYMNTS by the Treasury Department.
“Concentration among vendors developing models, providing data and providing cloud services may also introduce risks, which could amplify existing third-party service provider risks,” Yellen added. “And insufficient or faulty data could also perpetuate or introduce new biases in financial decision making.”
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Job cuts in government, technology and retail led the way as U.S. employers announced the largest number of cuts in one month since May 2020.
Among the 275,240 job cuts announced in March, 216,215 were in government, 15,055 were in technology and 11,709 were in retail, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report released Thursday (April 3).
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the report. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”
The total number of job cuts made in March was more than three times the 90,309 cuts announced in March 2024, according to the report.
By sector, compared to March 2024, government job cuts were almost six times higher, technology cuts were about 6% higher and retail cuts were nearly twice as high, per the report.
All the government job cuts made in March occurred in the federal government, the report said.
The top reason employers gave for cutting jobs in March was “DOGE impact,” which was cited for 216,670 of the month’s cuts, according to the report.
Other common reasons included store, unit or department closing, to which 17,666 job cuts were attributed, and market/economic conditions, which accounted for 11,594 cuts, per the report.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas also said in the report that employers are planning to hire fewer workers than they were a year ago. Companies’ hiring plans dropped by about 37%, from 21,102 in March 2024 to 13,198 in March 2025, according to the report.
The specter of uncertain job security may accelerate a spending pullback that is already in motion, PYMNTS reported Wednesday (April 2). Consumer confidence that was already shaken may have been further impacted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest snapshot of the labor market released Tuesday (April 1), which found that the labor market slowed in February, with a decline in job openings over the past year.
The Conference Board reported March 25 that consumer confidence slipped for the fourth straight month in March, due in part to a plunge in consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions.
