ChatGPT Experiences Five-Hour Outage

During the night of December 11-12, the ChatGPT chatbot, the Sora video generator, and the API for developers from OpenAI experienced an outage.

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

The services were down for several hours before the company managed to restore functionality.

ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered. https://t.co/OKiQYp3tXE

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024

Elon Musk seized the opportunity to hint at the uninterrupted operation of the Grok chatbot from his startup xAI.

@Grok ?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2024

On December 11, Apple released a software update for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, adding support for ChatGPT in the Siri voice assistant. OpenAI’s developer community leader Edwin Arbus stated that the events were unrelated. The outage was caused by configuration changes that rendered many servers inaccessible.

Previously, the AI startup’s chatbot experienced operational issues—in June, the service was unresponsive for over five hours. Problems also arose earlier in the week during the launch of the Sora video generator—due to a surge in users, some were unable to create videos.

Earlier in December, OpenAI introduced a full version of the “thinking” model o1 and a professional mode for it.