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Access to ChatGPT is currently undergoing restoration after a recent disruption that occurred on a Thursday afternoon. The issue, which affected both ChatGPT and its API, was confirmed by OpenAI to be linked to an “upstream provider.”
During the disruption, a significant number of users experienced difficulties as ChatGPT abruptly stopped responding to inquiries. Some users reported encountering an “internal server error” message when trying to use the chatbot. The disruption began around 1:30 PM ET, coinciding with a surge in reports on Down Detector regarding ChatGPT’s outage.
OpenAI posted a status update on its website at 2 PM ET, acknowledging the high error rates being experienced by ChatGPT, its API, and the text-to-video generator Sora. By 6:15 PM ET, OpenAI confirmed that Sora was fully operational, and API recovery efforts were underway. However, a comprehensive solution for ChatGPT and its APIs was still in progress at that time.
The disruption was further complicated by a reported power issue at one of Microsoft’s datacenters, the cloud provider for OpenAI. This issue not only affected OpenAI’s services but also impacted North America and Xbox cloud gaming. While Microsoft attributed the disruption to a “power incident,” the specific upstream provider responsible for the problem was not disclosed.
Customers in the South Central US were specifically affected by a storage latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors as a result of the power incident. Microsoft confirmed that a power outage had occurred in the South Central US AZ03 region and enforced mitigation measures to restore services. Further updates were promised within the hour to keep customers informed of the recovery progress.
By 5 p.m. Eastern Time on the same day, Microsoft reported that the affected datacenter had been fully restored to power, bringing relief to impacted services.
The recent downtime experienced by ChatGPT is not an isolated incident. In the past few months, the chatbot has faced intermittent outages, with a significant disruption occurring shortly after the introduction of Sora to ChatGPT subscribers by OpenAI. In June, ChatGPT was also taken offline due to a widespread outage affecting various AI tools.
As of December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI have provided updates on the ongoing restoration efforts to ensure that ChatGPT and its associated services are fully operational once again.
