When the chatbot abruptly ceased responding to queries on Thursday afternoon, ChatGPT stopped functioning for a large number of users. Some users saw a “internal server error” warning.
Reports on Down Detector started to increase at 1:30 PM ET, which appears to be when the outage began. In a status page update at 2:00 PM ET, OpenAI stated that ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora are “currently experiencing high error rates.” According to OpenAI, Sora returned to the internet at 6:15 PM ET, and ChatGPT showed a “full recovery” at approximately 11 PM ET.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s sole cloud provider, reported a “power issue” at one of their datacenters that began around the same time as the OpenAI incident, however OpenAI could not identify the “upstream provider” involved.
ctive: HTTP 500 errors, timeouts, or storage latency in the South Central United States
Impact Statement: As of 18:44 UTC on December 26, 2024, you have been recognized as a customer who may have had a worse experience due to a power outage in the South Central United States.
Present Situation: A power outage in the South Central US (AZ03) impacted several services. We have implemented mitigation and are now confirming that the affected services have recovered. We’ll provide further information in an hour or sooner if circumstances demand it.
The last edit to this message was made on December 26, 2024, at 21:22 UTC.
Microsoft claimed to have “fully restored” power to the impacted datacenter shortly after 5 PM ET.
ChatGPT has experienced several outages in theduring the last few months. The video production tool and ChatGPT fell down for hours just a few days after OpenAI made Sora available to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month. In the meantime, ChatGPT was shut down in June due to a large outage that affected AI tools.issues that impacted North America, as well as issues with Xbox cloud gaming.
