OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT services suffered a major outage on Thursday in the US and some other regions. As per reports registered on an online outage monitor, the outage began roughly around 1:30pm ET on December 26 (12:00am IST, December 27). The outage also affected the AI firm’s API service, as well as the text-to-image platform Sora. Notably, the issue persisted for nearly five hours before the company updated that the platforms were fully operational again.
OpenAI Suffers a Major Outage
According to the online outage monitoring platform Down Detector, a spike for ChatGPT was first spotted at 1:30pm ET, with about 50,000 users reporting an inability to access the AI chatbot. At 2:00pm ET (12:30am IST), OpenAI posted the first official update on its status page and said, “We are currently experiencing an issue with high error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.”
Soon after, the AI firm said that the issue was identified to be caused by an “upstream provider”, but did not specify it. Around the same time, Microsoft reported a power issue in one of its data centres in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), highlighting that it affected the access and functionality of various Microsoft 365 services, Azure, and Xbox cloud gaming.
“We determined that an unexpected power incident in a portion of South Central US, AZ03, has affected multiple services,” the tech giant highlighted in a status page update. Microsoft’s services were back up by 5:00pm ET (3:30am IST). Just an hour later, at 6:15pm ET (4:45am IST), OpenAI shared an update saying Sora was fully operational. It could not be confirmed whether the two outages were related.
OpenAI’s last update came at 6:04pm ET (7:34am IST) where it highlighted that ChatGPT was mostly recovered. At the time of writing this, Gadgets 360 staff members were able to access and interact with ChatGPT on both the web client and the mobile app. The reports on Down Detector have also fallen to a single-digit number. The AI firm has said it will run a full root-cause analysis of this outage.
