OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora Experience Major Outage

On Thursday, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora faced a significant outage that lasted for more than four hours, leaving many users frustrated. The incident started around 11 a.m. PT, but fortunately, services began to gradually come back online at approximately 3:16 p.m. PT.

User Experiences During the Outage

TechCrunch had a tough time accessing both ChatGPT and Sora during the afternoon, encountering persistent error messages. If you’ve relied on these tools, this surprise downtime might have felt reminiscent of an earlier hiccup earlier this month when the services were temporarily unavailable as well.

What’s Behind the Disruption?

According to OpenAI’s status page, the outage was linked to issues with one of their upstream providers, although details remained sparse. By 2:05 p.m. PT, they reported that ChatGPT was partially recovered, advising users to expect possible difficulties loading their chat history. Thankfully, Sora regained full functionality shortly after at 3:16 p.m. OpenAI is actively addressing the remaining issues with ChatGPT and its developer-facing API.

A Pattern of Disruptions

This incident is particularly noteworthy as it’s the second major outage for OpenAI’s services in December alone. Just two weeks prior, a similar breakdown occurred, attributed to problems with a new telemetry service. That outage lasted an unusually long six hours, which is twice the duration users typically experience during such events, usually lasting one to two hours.

Interestingly, popular applications utilizing OpenAI’s API, like Perplexity and Apple’s Siri, appeared unaffected by this latest disturbance. Their status pages affirmed that these services continued running smoothly.

Final Thoughts: Keeping Pace with AI Innovations

As users of AI applications, it’s essential to stay informed about potential disruptions and the evolving technology landscape. While outages can be frustrating, they remind us of the complexities involved in maintaining cutting-edge technology.

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