OpenAI’s flagship tools, ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API, encountered a significant outage on Wednesday, disrupting services for users worldwide. The company began investigating the issue at approximately 3:17 PM PT and provided updates on its status page throughout the evening.
By 4:55 PM PT, OpenAI announced it had identified a pathway to recovery and was actively working on a fix. While traffic to ChatGPT and its API partially resumed by 5:50 PM PT, Sora remained inaccessible. A message on ChatGPT’s homepage during the downtime confirmed the service was unavailable but reassured users that a resolution was in progress.
The outage coincided with the launch of OpenAI’s integration with Apple in iOS 18.2, a feature that likely generated a surge in server traffic. Social media reports suggested that some users experienced difficulties accessing ChatGPT within Apple Intelligence due to the downtime.
Sora, a newly launched video-generation tool, also faced challenges earlier this week. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted the company underestimated demand, leading to server capacity issues and preventing many early adopters from generating videos on launch day.
Interestingly, OpenAI’s outage followed another global service disruption affecting Meta’s platforms on the same day. While no direct connection has been established between the two incidents, the timing raised speculation among users online.
This disruption occurred during OpenAI’s “12 Days of Shipmas” event, where the company has been unveiling new tools and updates daily as part of its holiday season initiative. So far, the campaign has featured announcements such as the full release of its o1 reasoning model, updates to Canvas, a reinforcement fine-tuning research program, and the debut of Sora.
When contacted for comment, OpenAI referred TechCrunch to an update shared on its X account, maintaining transparency about the issue.
Featured image courtesy of Time
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