On Thursday afternoon, ChatGPT suffered a major outage that prevented many users from using the AI chatbot or related services. Around 1:30 PM ET, users started reporting “internal server error” warnings. OpenAI’s API and text-to-video generator, Sora, were affected by the disruption, highlighting how important it is for backend operations to run smoothly.
At 2:00 PM ET, OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page, noting that “high error rates are currently occurring in ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.” While APIs were starting to recover, the company announced that Sora was “fully operational” by 6:15 PM ET. Engineers were still working on a solution, though, as the chatbot itself continued to have problems.
According to DownDetector, tons of US users reported that the site wasn’t working for them in the early afternoon, though the reports started receding after half an hour or so.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s sole cloud partner, claimed a power outage at its South Central US data center, although the company did not identify the precise “upstream provider” liable for the interruption. The issue, which began concurrently with ChatGPT’s outage, resulted in HTTP 500 errors, timeouts, and storage lag. Xbox Cloud, Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, was also impacted.
OpenAI reported that disruptions were also occurring in Sora and API. The company announced a few hours later that the Sora issue had been fixed and that it was now working on ChatGPT and the API, both of which were nearly resolved.
This month, ChatGPT has gone through several outages. The most recent one happened on December 11, the day Apple released iOS 18.2, which included GPT integration in Siri. Consequently, some users may be unable to use the OpenAI chatbot through Siri at the moment. The last time ChatGPT experienced a similar outage was on December 11. During the most recent outage, Sora, ChatGPT, and API were all affected. Downdetector indicates that 2,483 outage reports were made during that time.
This kind of outage has been suffering the AI model for a while. On November 8, more than 19,000 customers globally experienced a 30-minute outage of ChatGPT.
When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that ChatGPT had been down for 30 minutes, he included a frown emoji along with the words, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but more work in front of us.”
The last time ChatGPT experienced a similar outage was on December 11. During the most recent outage, Sora, ChatGPT, and API were all affected. Downdetector indicates that 2,483 outage reports were made during that time.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT has grown to 250 million weekly active users since its launch in November 2022.
With revenues rising to $3.6 billion from zero, OpenAI’s valuation has soared to $157 billion, up from $14 billion in 2021, and it has significantly outperformed Sam Altman’s projections at the time.
Altman stated earlier this month that 300 million active users per week were now using the company’s technologies.
