ChatGPT and Sora suffer major outage amid high demand

 

Olanrewaju Adeniyi

 

OpenAI suffered a major outage around 3:00 p.m. PT on Wednesday, leaving users of ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API digitally stranded.

The AI company confirmed the outage on its status page but issued another update around 9:00 p.m. PT, claiming its services have been largely restored.

In a tweet, OpenAI stated, “ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today, but we’ve recovered.”

The cause of the outage was not yet known. Around 7:00 p.m. PT, OpenAI announced on their status page that ChatGPT, the API, and Sora were gradually returning to the Internet.

ChatGPT error messages and impact

During the downtime, ChatGPT.com displayed an error message that said, “ChatGPT is currently unavailable. We’ve located the problem and are attempting to implement a solution.”

On the same day that OpenAI’s interface with Apple was introduced in iOS 18.2, ChatGPT went down. Due to Wednesday’s outage, some users complained on social media that ChatGPT was not functioning in Apple Intelligence. 

In a post on X, Edwin Arbus, the leader of the OpenAI developer community, stated that the downtime had nothing to do with Apple Intelligence or 12 Days of OpenAI. “We changed the configuration, which made many servers unavailable.” 

Sora’s launch challenges

OpenAI also made Sora available to the public earlier this week. According to CEO Sam Altman, the business had to restrict the number of individuals who could join up because it didn’t foresee the volume of interest it would attract. On launch day, a large number of registered users were unable to create films because OpenAI’s servers were full.

The disruption comes after Meta’s products had another worldwide service failure early on Wednesday.

This product outage occurred on the fifth day of OpenAI’s “12 days of OpenAI” event, during which the firm has been shipping new products every day in the run-up to the holidays. OpenAI has announced the complete release of its o1 reasoning model, a research program focused on fine-tuning reinforcement, the release of Sora, certain Canvas upgrades, and the interface with Apple Intelligence. 

Edited