Microsoft-backed OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT was restored after a brief connection failure that affected thousands of users worldwide on Friday.

In a statement on its website, OpenAI said that issues with ChapGPT have now been resolved. It said most users regained access by 4:34 p.m. Pacific Time, while a small number continued to face issues until 5 p.m.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman address the incident X , saying that ChatGPT was down for about 30 minutes. He added that the company is much better at reliability than it used to be, but clearly, there is more work to do moving forward. 

OpenAI has launched an investigation into the cause of the outage.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, ChatGPT services were down for about half an hour, affecting over 19-thousand-403 users as of 4:13 p.m. Pacific Time.

ChatGPT had previously experienced outages in late 2023, and again in June this year.

Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has attracted 250 million weekly active users around the world.