OpenAI experienced a significant outage affecting its services, including ChatGPT, Sora, and the developer API, on Wednesday around 3 PM PT. The systems began to recover around 9 PM PT, as communicated through the company’s status page and a tweet stating, “ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered.”
The exact cause of the outage remains unclear. OpenAI provided updates indicating that services were gradually coming back online by approximately 7 PM PT. Users attempting to access ChatGPT during the outage encountered an error message, which noted that the issue was recognized and efforts were underway to resolve it.
Interestingly, the outage coincided with the launch of OpenAI’s integration with Apple’s iOS 18.2. Some users mentioned on social media that the downtime impacted their ability to use ChatGPT features on Apple’s platform. Edwin Arbus, the lead for OpenAI’s developer community, clarified that the disruption was unrelated to Apple’s new features, explaining that a configuration change led to many servers being unavailable.
Earlier in the week, OpenAI had also launched Sora publicly. However, demand exceeded expectations, leading to limitations on sign-ups and some users facing issues generating videos on launch day due to server capacity limitations.
Remarkably, this outage mirrored a separate global service interruption affecting Meta’s products around the same time. The timing of OpenAI’s outage was noteworthy as it fell on the fifth day of OpenAI’s ongoing “12 Days of OpenAI” event, where the company has been rolling out new products daily as part of their buildup to the holiday season. Innovations announced thus far include the full release of the o1 reasoning model, a reinforcement fine-tuning research program, and updates to Canvas.
Despite the challenges faced during this outage, OpenAI’s rapid response in restoring services highlights their commitment to maintaining operational reliability and innovation. Looking forward, this experience can serve as a valuable lesson in server management as the demand for AI technologies continues to rise.
In summary, although OpenAI faced a significant disruption, the company has successfully restored services and continues to innovate in a rapidly evolving tech environment. This resilience bodes well for the future as they adapt to user needs and technological challenges.