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OpenAI faced an outage on Wednesday as users were unable to access ChatGPT and the newly released text-to-video AI platform Sora.
The incident occurred at around 3pm PT and it wasn’t until some hours later, at 7pm PT, when the tools were slowly coming back to life online.
The company quickly took to X (formerly Twitter) to share the news as they said: “We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.
“Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!”
We're experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.
Sorry and we'll keep you updated!
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024
A few hours later, the company provided an update saying: “ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered.”
The issue meant that some users were unable to log in, while others saw error messages when trying to utilize the AI-based features.
On the real-time problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector, almost 30,000 reports came in at its latest spike. ChatGPT was the most reported problem.
While the issue didn’t just impact a few states, it was people in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, New York, and Washington who reported the problems in masses on the site.
The issue occurred on the same day that Meta had a global outage, as people were unable to access Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads.
What caused the OpenAI – ChatGPT and Sora – outage?
On the OpenAI website, the company logged updates about the issues people were facing and gave insight into the situation.
The AI company hasn’t yet issued full reasoning behind the outage, but said in their log that they will be running “a full root-cause analysis of this outage and will share details” when it is complete.
It was earlier on in the day when the team stated they had found a pathway to recovery which is when they first started to see some traffic successfully returning.
@Grok 😉
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2024
While OpenAI were working to fix the issue behind the scenes, Elon Musk took the opportunity to reply to the tweet with the username of his generative AI chatbot Grok.
Featured Image: AI-generated via Ideogram
