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Access to ChatGPT is currently being restored following a disruption that occurred during Thursday afternoon. Users of ChatGPT, as well as its API and the text-to-video generator Sora, found themselves unable to access the services due to an issue with an “upstream provider,” as confirmed by OpenAI.
The disruption began around 1:30 PM ET, causing ChatGPT to malfunction and users to experience internal server errors when trying to interact with the chatbot. This was evident from the increased number of reports on Down Detector around the same time. OpenAI acknowledged the problem and posted a status update on their website at 2 PM ET, informing users that ChatGPT, the API, and Sora were all experiencing high error rates.
By 6:15 PM ET, Sora was reported to be fully operational, and the APIs were beginning to recover. However, OpenAI mentioned that comprehensive efforts were still ongoing to resolve the issues with ChatGPT and its APIs.
Microsoft, the cloud provider for OpenAI, also faced a power issue at one of its datacenters, affecting services in North America, including Xbox cloud gaming. Although the cause was not explicitly mentioned, it was suspected to be linked to the “upstream provider” issue affecting OpenAI.
Customers in the South Central US were specifically impacted by storage latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors due to the power incident. Microsoft implemented mitigation measures and was in the process of verifying the recovery of affected services as of 18:44 UTC on December 26, 2024.
On the same day, Microsoft confirmed that the affected datacenter in the South Central US AZ03 region had been fully restored to power by 5 PM Eastern Time. The company assured customers that efforts were being made to ensure the smooth functioning of services in the aftermath of the outage.
Over the past few months, ChatGPT has faced intermittent periods of downtime, with the most recent disruption aligning with the release of Sora to subscribers earlier in the month. In June, a widespread outage affected AI tools, including ChatGPT, leading to an extended period of downtime for users.
As of the latest update on December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work towards resolving the issues and ensuring a stable service for users. Additional information is expected to be provided within the hour to update customers on the status of services affected by the disruption.
