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Access to ChatGPT is currently being restored following a disruption that occurred on Thursday afternoon. OpenAI confirmed that Sora, its API, and ChatGPT were all affected by an issue with an “upstream provider.” Users reported experiencing difficulties with the chatbot, which was unable to respond to inquiries and displayed an “internal server error” message.
The disruption began around 1:30 PM ET, coinciding with a spike in Down Detector reports. OpenAI posted a status update on its website at 2 PM ET, stating that ChatGPT, the API, and Sora were experiencing “high error rates.” While Sora was reported to be fully operational by 6:15 PM ET, APIs were still in the process of recovering. OpenAI indicated that they were working on a comprehensive solution for ChatGPT and its APIs.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s cloud provider, reported a “power issue” at one of its datacenters that affected North America, including Xbox cloud gaming. However, the specific “upstream provider” responsible for the issue was not disclosed.
Customers in the South Central United States were advised of “storage latency, timeouts, or HTTP 500 errors” due to a power incident. Microsoft informed affected customers that mitigation measures had been implemented and that recovery efforts were ongoing. The datacenter was reported to be fully restored to power by 5 p.m. Eastern Time.
ChatGPT has faced intermittent downtime in recent months, particularly following the release of Sora earlier this month. The video generation utility and ChatGPT experienced an extended period of downtime immediately after Sora was introduced to subscribers. In June, a widespread outage affected AI tools, including ChatGPT.
As of December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI have provided an update on the situation. Customers are advised to stay tuned for further information as the restoration process continues.
