OpenAI experienced a significant outage affecting its ChatGPT services on Thursday across the United States and several other regions. Reports from an online outage monitoring site indicated that the problems began around 1:30 PM ET on December 26 (12:00 AM IST, December 27). This disruption also impacted the company’s API services and the text-to-image platform, Sora. The outage lasted nearly five hours before OpenAI confirmed that its services were fully restored.
OpenAI Faces Major Service Disruption
Down Detector, a website that tracks service outages, reported a noticeable spike in issues with ChatGPT starting at 1:30 PM ET, with approximately 50,000 users unable to access the AI chatbot. At 2:00 PM ET (12:30 AM IST), OpenAI issued its first official statement on its status page, acknowledging the heightened error rates affecting ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.
Shortly thereafter, OpenAI identified the problem as stemming from an “upstream provider,” although further details were not disclosed. Concurrently, Microsoft noted a power issue in one of its data centers in a post on X (formerly Twitter), stating that it impacted various Microsoft 365 services, Azure, and Xbox cloud gaming functions.
In its communications, Microsoft confirmed that an unexpected power incident in a part of South Central US (specifically AZ03) disrupted multiple services. By 5:00 PM ET (3:30 AM IST), Microsoft’s services had resumed normal operations. Around an hour later, at 6:15 PM ET (4:45 AM IST), OpenAI announced that Sora was back online. It remains unclear if there is a connection between the two outages.
The final update from OpenAI came at 6:04 PM ET (7:34 AM IST), indicating that ChatGPT was nearing full recovery. By the time of this reporting, staff members at Gadgets 360 succeeded in accessing and using ChatGPT through both the web client and mobile application. Additionally, user reports on Down Detector had dropped to single digits. OpenAI indicated its intent to conduct a comprehensive root-cause analysis regarding the outage.
