ChatGPT and Sora Outage: Second Downtime This Month

OpenAI Services Experience Significant Outage

ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s API for developers were unavailable for over four hours on Thursday. OpenAI reported the initial disruption began at 11 a.m. PT, and service restoration is currently underway as of 3:16 p.m. PT.

Users familiar with ChatGPT will remember a similar service interruption occurred earlier this month.

Access Issues Reported

TechCrunch encountered error messages while attempting to access both ChatGPT and Sora during the afternoon of Thursday.

Outage Cause and Recovery

According to OpenAI’s status page, the major outage stemmed from an issue with one of its upstream providers. Specific details regarding the cause were not provided.

By 2:05 p.m. PT, ChatGPT was reported as partially functional, though users continued to experience difficulties loading previous conversations.

Sora was brought back online at 3:16 p.m. PT. OpenAI is currently focused on implementing a complete resolution for ChatGPT and its associated API.

Recent History of Disruptions

This marks the second instance of service downtime for OpenAI’s suite of products within December.

A previous outage, occurring two weeks prior, was attributed to a malfunctioning new telemetry service. That disruption lasted approximately six hours, representing an extended period of unavailability.

Outages typically resolve within one to two hours.

Impact on Third-Party Services

Services reliant on OpenAI’s API, such as Perplexity and the Siri integration with Apple Intelligence, did not appear to be impacted by this particular outage. This was confirmed by both companies’ status pages and testing conducted by TechCrunch.

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