At the moment, access to ChatGPT is gradually being restored after a recent disruption on a Thursday afternoon.
Sora, an essential component of ChatGPT, along with its API, was all impacted by an issue with an “upstream provider,” according to confirmation from OpenAI.
The disruption initially occurred on a Thursday afternoon, resulting in ChatGPT becoming unusable for a large number of users. Users were suddenly met with a chatbot that was unable to respond to queries, and some encountered an “internal server error” message.
The disruption seemed to have started around 1:30 PM ET, coinciding with a noticeable increase in reports on Down Detector. OpenAI released a status update on their website by 2 PM ET, indicating that ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora were all experiencing “high error rates.”
By 6:15 PM ET, OpenAI reported that “Sora is now fully operational, and we are continuing to monitor.” APIs were beginning to recover, although a comprehensive resolution for ChatGPT and its APIs was described as still being worked on.
In a related incident, Microsoft, the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI, reported a “power issue” at one of its data centers around the same time as the OpenAI problems. This issue impacted North America as well as other services such as Xbox cloud gaming. However, the exact “upstream provider” linked to the issue was not mentioned.
An incident report from Microsoft stated that there were delays in storage, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors in the South Central United States. Customers in this region were advised of a potential degraded experience due to a power incident that began at 18:44 UTC on December 26, 2024.
As of the most recent update on December 26, 2024, at 21:22 UTC, Microsoft had restored power to the affected data center in the South Central US AZ03 region.
ChatGPT has faced intermittent downtime over the past few months. Following the introduction of Sora to ChatGPT users earlier this month, the video generation tool and ChatGPT experienced a prolonged period of downtime. In June, ChatGPT was also impacted by a widespread outage affecting various AI tools.
As of December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI have provided an updated on the situation.