ChatGPT is returning following an outage. Thursday afternoon

When the chatbot abruptly ceased responding to queries on Thursday afternoon, ChatGPT stopped functioning for a large number of users. Some users saw a "internal server error" warning.

Reports on Down Detector started to increase at 1:30 PM ET, which appears to be when the outage began. OpenAI stated that ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora are "currently experiencing high error rates" in a status page update at 2:00 PM ET.

"Sora is now fully operational and we are continuing to monitor," stated OpenAI at 6:15 PM ET. APIs are beginning to bounce back. According to the most recent notice, an overall remedy for ChatGPT and associated APIs is still being worked on.

Microsoft, OpenAI's sole cloud provider, reported a "power issue" at one of its datacentres that began at the same time as the OpenAI issues and impacted North America, along with issues with Xbox cloud gaming. However, OpenAI did not identify the "upstream provider" connected to the incident.
Microsoft claimed to have "fully restored" power to the impacted datacentre shortly after 5 PM ET.

 

Over the last few months, ChatGPT has experienced multiple outages. The video production tool and ChatGPT fell down for hours just a few days after OpenAI made Sora available to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month. In the meantime, ChatGPT was shut down in June due to a large outage that affected AI tools.