ChatGPT stopped working for many users on Thursday afternoon, when the chatbot suddenly couldn’t respond to queries, with some users seeing an “internal server error” message.
ChatGPT access has recovered after an outage Thursday afternoon
OpenAI confirmed a problem with an ‘upstream provider’ caused issues for Sora, its API, and ChatGPT.
OpenAI confirmed a problem with an ‘upstream provider’ caused issues for Sora, its API, and ChatGPT.
Image: The Verge
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
It looks like the outage started around 1:30PM ET, which is when reports began to spike on Down Detector. At 2PM ET, OpenAI posted an update to its status page, saying ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora are “currently experiencing high error rates.” OpenAI said Sora came back online at 6:15PM ET, before seeing a “full recovery” for ChatGPT at around 11PM ET.
OpenAI didn’t specify the “upstream provider” linked to the issue, but its exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft, reported a “power issue” at one of its datacenters that started around the same time as the OpenAI problems and affected North America, and problems with Xbox cloud gaming.
Active - Storage latency, timeouts, or HTTP 500 errors in South Central US
Impact Statement: Starting at 18:44 UTC on 26 Dec 2024, you have been identified as a customer who was impacted by a power incident in South Central US and may experience a degraded experience.
Current Status: There was a power incident in the South Central US AZ03 which affected multiple services. We have applied mitigation and are actively validating recovery to the impacted services. Further updates will be provided in 60 minutes, or sooner as events warrant.
This message was last updated at 21:22 UTC on 26 December 2024
Just after 5PM ET, Microsoft said it had “fully restored” power to the affected datacenter.
ChatGPT has gone down a few times in the past several months. Just days after OpenAI released Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, the video generation tool and ChatGPT went down for hours. Meanwhile, a widespread outage affecting AI tools brought down ChatGPT in June.
Update, December 26th: Added an update from OpenAI and Microsoft.
Update, December 27th: Noted ChatGPT is back online.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
