Major outage disrupts OpenAI’s ChatGPT, API, and Sora services

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, API, and Sora services experienced a major outage on Wednesday, December 11, 2024 leaving millions of users unable to access the company’s flagship AI tools for over four hours.

According to updates on OpenAI’s status page, the disruption, which began at 3:16pm PST, was resolved by 7:38pm PST.

Key Details of the Outage

OpenAI confirmed that the issue stemmed from a configuration change that rendered many servers unavailable. The outage affected users globally, causing errors in API calls, login failures, and interruptions for both ChatGPT and Sora.

We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.

Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024

As of 6:50pm PST, OpenAI had partially restored services, with full recovery achieved shortly after.

The incident coincided with OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign, an event highlighting daily product releases, including its integration with Apple Intelligence on iOS 18.2 and the public launch of Sora.

However, the outage disrupted the availability of these features, leading to widespread user frustration.

“We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix,” read an error message displayed on ChatGPT.com during the downtime.

The outage sparked frustration across social media, particularly among students and professionals who rely on OpenAI’s tools for critical tasks, highlighting the user dependency that already exists on ChatGPT.

Businesses utilising OpenAI’s API for applications also faced disruptions, potentially leading to revenue losses.

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Technical challenges amid rapid growth

The outage followed Sora’s high-demand launch earlier this week. Users reported difficulties accessing the service due to server capacity issues.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the company had underestimated interest in the tool.

OpenAI developer community lead Edwin Arbus stated that the outage was unrelated to the “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign or the Apple Intelligence integration, attributing it instead to internal server configurations.

Neal Riley, co-founder of Salable, warned that even short interruptions could have lasting consequences in the competitive AI market.

“The recent introduction of Sora saw some immediate scaling challenges, and this latest outage comes on the heels of announcing ChatGPT’s integration into Apple Intelligence issues.

“While we have yet to see the post-mortem on this four-hour outage, the forums were raft with messages demonstrating minimal user tolerance for interruption to service.”

The outage occurred as OpenAI faces growing competition from Google and Amazon’s AI offerings. Both companies have released advanced AI products rapidly gaining traction, making user retention critical for OpenAI’s success.

Riley added: “Even four hours of downtime is enough to get users to try new services and break the muscle memory they have built up with ChatGPT.”

Following the incident, the company reported on its status page that it “will run a full root-cause analysis of this outage and share details on this page when complete.”