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Access to ChatGPT is gradually being reinstated after facing an unexpected disruption on Thursday afternoon. Users across the platform were left bewildered as the chatbot stopped responding to queries and instead displayed an “internal server error” message. The root cause of this disruption was identified as an issue with an “upstream provider,” as confirmed by OpenAI, the brains behind the widely popular chatbot service.
The chaos ensued around 1:30 PM ET when users started reporting a surge in outages on Down Detector, signaling the beginning of the problem. OpenAI promptly posted a status update on their website at 2 PM ET, acknowledging the high error rates plaguing ChatGPT, the API, and the revolutionary text-to-video generator Sora. Fast forward to 6:15 PM ET, Sora was declared fully operational, while the APIs were slowly showing signs of recovery. However, the comprehensive fix for ChatGPT and its APIs was still under development at the time.
Interestingly, Microsoft, OpenAI’s cloud provider, concurrently faced a “power issue” at one of its datacenters that adversely impacted services across North America, including Xbox cloud gaming. While there was speculation that this incident might have been linked to the ChatGPT disruption, no official confirmation was provided regarding the connection to the “upstream provider” mentioned by OpenAI.
The incident update from Microsoft detailed that storage latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors were observed in the South Central United States due to a power incident that transpired at 18:44 UTC on December 26, 2024. Alarmed customers were reassured that mitigation actions were in place, and the affected services were undergoing recovery verification. Regular updates were promised within the hour to keep users informed of the progress.
By 21:22 UTC on the same day, Microsoft relayed that the impacted datacenter in the South Central US AZ03 region had been fully restored to power, culminating the incident on a positive note.
ChatGPT has had its fair share of bumps in recent months, with intermittent downtimes becoming somewhat of a recurring theme. The rollout of Sora to ChatGPT subscribers marked a turning point earlier this month, ushering in a period of prolonged downtime for both the video generation utility and the chatbot itself. Prior to that, in June, a widespread outage hit AI tools, bringing ChatGPT to a screeching halt.
In the latest development on December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI provided an update to reassure users and shed light on the progress made in restoring ChatGPT and its associated services.
