On Thursday, OpenAI’s ChatGPT services experienced a significant outage in the United States and several other areas. Outage reports indicated that the disruption began at approximately 1:30pm ET on December 26 (12:00am IST, December 27). The outage impacted not only the AI chatbot but also the company’s API service and its text-to-image platform, Sora. The issues persisted for nearly five hours before OpenAI confirmed that the platforms were back online.
OpenAI Experiences Significant Service Interruptions
Data from outage monitoring site Down Detector revealed that the first indication of trouble arose around 1:30pm ET, with approximately 50,000 users reporting issues accessing ChatGPT. By 2:00pm ET (12:30am IST), OpenAI acknowledged the problem on its status page, stating, “We are currently experiencing an issue with high error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.”
Shortly thereafter, OpenAI attributed the outage to a problem with an “upstream provider” but did not provide further details. Around the same time, Microsoft announced a power issue affecting one of its data centers in a post on X (formerly Twitter), noting the impact on various Microsoft 365 services, Azure, and Xbox cloud gaming.
The tech company stated, “We determined that an unexpected power incident in a portion of South Central US, AZ03, has affected multiple services,” according to a status page update. Microsoft reported that its services were restored by 5:00pm ET (3:30am IST). An hour later, at 6:15pm ET (4:45am IST), OpenAI announced that Sora was fully operational. It remains unclear if the two outages were interconnected.
OpenAI provided its final update at 6:04pm ET (7:34am IST), indicating that ChatGPT had mostly returned to normal functionality. By that time, staff members at Gadgets 360 were able to access and use ChatGPT through both the web client and mobile app. Reports of the outage on Down Detector had significantly decreased to single digits. OpenAI has committed to conducting a comprehensive root-cause analysis of the incident.
