ChatGPT, OpenAI’s widely used AI application, faced a significant outage on Thursday afternoon, leaving many users unable to access the service. The San Francisco-based company confirmed that the app had recovered fully by late Thursday night.
Timeline of the Outage
The issues began around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, with users experiencing difficulties accessing ChatGPT. OpenAI attributed the disruptions to “high error rates caused by an upstream provider.”
By late Thursday night, OpenAI updated its status page to confirm a “full recovery” of ChatGPT at 11:16 p.m. Eastern Time. The company assured users that it would conduct a thorough root-cause analysis of the outage and share the findings on its status page.
Additional Issues with Sora
While the main ChatGPT service and API were restored, OpenAI also reported a separate incident involving its video generation model, Sora. Details regarding this issue have yet to be disclosed.
Impact on Users
The outage affected over 15,000 users, according to Downdetector, an online platform tracking service interruptions. Most issues were related to ChatGPT’s core functionality. However, reports of problems dwindled to fewer than 50 by late evening.
About ChatGPT and OpenAI
ChatGPT, launched in 2022, has become a cornerstone of OpenAI’s offerings, capable of generating human-like responses based on user prompts. The platform boasts over 200 million active users, including a significant presence within Fortune 500 companies that rely on OpenAI’s products and APIs.
CEO Sam Altman in the Spotlight
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been in the news recently, not only for leading the company but also for his planned $1 million donation to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, a spokesperson confirmed earlier this month.
This outage serves as a reminder of the challenges involved in maintaining seamless service for a platform as widely used as ChatGPT. OpenAI’s upcoming root-cause analysis will shed more light on the incident and the measures being taken to prevent similar disruptions in the future.
