ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API all went down for more than four hours on Thursday. OpenAI reports it began experiencing a large outage around 11 a.m. PT, but its services are gradually returning as of 3:16 p.m. PT. Frequent ChatGPT users may recall that the service was also unavailable earlier this month.
TechCrunch reported that the team encountered errors while attempting to make use of ChatGPT and Sora on Thursday afternoon.
According to DownDetector, a large number of US users reported that the site was down in the early afternoon, but the reports began to fade after about 30 minutes.
Noticing the downtime, OpenAI commented on X that it had found the problem and was working on it.
OpenAI could not name the “upstream provider” associated with the incident, but its exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft, reported a “power issue” at one of its data centres that began at the same time as the OpenAI problems and affected North America, as well as issues with Xbox cloud gaming.
From its status page, OpenAI claims that the major outage was caused by one of its upstream providers, but provides no other information. As of 2:05 p.m. PT, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT has partially recovered, but users may still have trouble loading their chat history. Sora resumed operations at 3:16 p.m. PT. The company claims it is actively working on a complete patch for ChatGPT and its API.
This is the second time OpenAI’s services have gone down in December. When this occurred two weeks earlier, OpenAI blamed the outage on a new telemetry service that went wrong. The outage lasted approximately 6 hours, which was an extremely extended disruption. Typically, these outages last about an hour or two.
Common services using OpenAI’s API, such as Perplexity and Siri’s Apple Intelligence integration, did not appear to be impacted by the outage, according to the firms’ status websites and TechCrunch testing.
In addition to the many outages this month, ChatGPT encountered technical difficulties in early June, when it went down for a few hours. ChatGPT is widely regarded as the most popular chatbot in the artificial intelligence market, with CEO Sam Altman starting earlier this month that the AI assistant has more than 300 million weekly users and sends over one billion messages every day. The chatbot is free to use, however there are some constraints for users who want to avoid paying tiers.
OpenAI reported that API and Sora were also experiencing disruptions. A few hours later, the company announced that the Sora issue had been resolved and that it is now working on ChatGPT and API, which are also nearly complete.
ChatGPT has experienced several outages this month, the most recent occurring on December 11, the same day Apple released iOS 18.2 with GPT integration in Siri. As a result, some users may be unable to access the OpenAI chatbot via Siri at the present.
ChatGPT previously experienced a similar outage in December of 2011. The previous outage also affected all three platforms: Sora, ChatGPT, and API. According to Downdetector, there were 2,483 outage reports at the time.
At the time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that ChatGPT had been down for 30 minutes, along with a frown emoji and the words, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work ahead of us.”
Nonetheless, since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has added 250 million weekly active users.
OpenAI’s valuation has risen to $157 billion, up from $14 billion in 2021, with revenues surging to $3.6 billion from nothing, well above Sam Altman’s estimates at the time.
Earlier this month, Altman stated that the company’s technology currently has 300 million active users weekly.
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