ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI developer APIs were down for more than four hours on Thursday. OpenAI said the major outage began at 11 a.m. PT, but as of 3:16 p.m. PT, the service was slowly coming back online. Frequent users of ChatGPT may remember that the service went down earlier this month.
TechCrunch received an error message Thursday afternoon when trying to access ChatGPT and Sora.
OpenAI said on its status page that the large-scale outage was caused by one of its upstream providers, but did not provide further details. OpenAI said as of 2:05 p.m. Pacific Time that ChatGPT has partially recovered, but users may still experience issues loading their chat history. At 3:16 p.m. Pacific time, Sora became operational again. The company says it is actively working on a complete fix for ChatGPT and its API.
This is the second time that OpenAI's services have gone down in December. When the issue arose two weeks ago, OpenAI blamed the outage on a glitch in its new telemetry service. This failure lasted approximately six hours, resulting in an unusually long interruption. Such an outage typically lasts only 1 to 2 hours.
Popular services that use OpenAI's APIs, such as Perplexity and Siri's Apple Intelligence integration, do not appear to be affected by the outage, according to the companies' status pages and testing by TechCrunch.
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