On Thursday afternoon, ChatGPT experienced a widespread outage, preventing users from accessing the chatbot and leading to error messages such as “internal server error.” The issues began around 1:30 PM ET, as users reported problems on Down Detector. The outage affected ChatGPT, its API, and OpenAI’s text-to-video generator, Sora.
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Outage details and recovery timeline
At 2:00 PM ET, OpenAI updated its status page, confirming that multiple services, including ChatGPT, were experiencing high error rates. The company also acknowledged that Sora had been affected but was restored by 6:15 PM ET. By 11:00 PM ET, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT had fully recovered, and service was restored to normal.
We’re investigating a power issue affecting access and functionality in OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online Sites, and Microsoft Teams primarily to users in North America. For more information, please refer to MO966473 in the admin center.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) December 26, 2024
Although OpenAI did not specifically mention the cause of the issue, Microsoft, the cloud provider for OpenAI, reported a power problem at one of its data centres around the same time. This issue impacted North America and was also linked to problems with Xbox cloud gaming.
Microsoft’s role in the outage
We’ve fully restored power to the affected datacenter. According to our telemetry, nearly all affected services have recovered or are in the process of recovering. For more information and service specific updates please refer to MO966473 in the admin center.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) December 26, 2024
The power incident at Microsoft’s data centre in South Central US started around the same time as the disruptions to OpenAI’s services. The outage was identified as having caused latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors in the region. Microsoft’s active recovery efforts led to a complete power restoration to the affected data centre by 5:00 PM ET. In the wake of the power incident, Microsoft applied mitigation measures and provided regular updates to customers, including those affected by the outage.
ChatGPT’s recent downtime history
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has experienced significant downtime. Earlier this month, OpenAI released the video generation tool Sora to ChatGPT subscribers, and ChatGPT and Sora were offline for hours. Additionally, in June, a broader AI tool outage brought down ChatGPT for several hours, causing frustration for many users.
Despite these issues, OpenAI and Microsoft are working to resolve such incidents quickly. Both companies continue to provide transparency regarding service disruptions and work together to restore normal operations as efficiently as possible.
