ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI’s developer-facing API went down Thursday for an hour and counting. OpenAI says it started experiencing a major outage at 11 AM PT, and the services still appear to be down at the time of publishing this article, around 12:40 PM PT. Frequent users of ChatGPT may recall that the service went down earlier this month as well.
TechCrunch received error messages when attempting to access ChatGPT and Sora on Thursday afternoon.
On its status page, OpenAI says the major outage was caused by one of their upstream providers, but doesn’t offer further detail. The company says it is actively working on a fix for the issue, but doesn’t say when the services will be operational again.
This is the second time that OpenAI’s family of services have gone down during the month of December. When this happened two weeks ago, OpenAI blamed the outage on a new telemetry service gone awry. That outage lasted for roughly 6 hours, an unusually long disruption. Typically, these outages only last an hour or two.
Popular services that use OpenAI’s API, like Perplexity and Siri’s Apple Intelligence integration, did not appear to be affected by the outage, according to the companies respective status pages and TechCrunch’s testing.