The ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI developer APIs were down for an hour on Thursday and remained down for a while. According to OpenAI, the major outage began at 11 a.m. Pacific Time, and the service still appeared to be down as of the time of publishing this article, at approximately 12:40 p.m. Pacific Time. 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. The company says it's actively working to fix the issue, but hasn't said when service will resume.
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.