ChatGPT, Sora and OpenAI’s developer-facing APIs were down for more than four hours on Thursday. OpenAI says it began experiencing severe outages at 11 a.m. PT, but now says its services are slowly coming back online as of 3:16 p.m. PT. Some ChatGPT users may remember that the service also went down earlier this month.
On Thursday afternoon, TechCrunch received error messages when trying to access ChatGPT and Sora.
On your own status pageOpenAI says the major outage was caused by one of their vendors, but does not provide further details. As of 2:05 PM PT, OpenAI reported that ChatGPT has been partially recovered, but users may still experience issues loading chat histories. At 3:16 PM PT, Sora started working again. The company says it is actively working on a full fix for ChatGPT and its API.
This is the second time the OpenAI family of services has crashed in December. When this happened two weeks ago, OpenAI blamed the outage on a recent telemetry service that went wrong. This break lasted about 6 hours, which was an extremely long break. Typically, these breaks only last an hour or two.
Popular services using the OpenAI API, e.g Embarrassment and Siri Apple Intelligence according to TechCrunch’s company status and testing pages, it doesn’t appear to have an impact on integration.