OpenAI Services Restored After Major Outage Linked to Power Issue

OpenAI’s ChatGPT services and Sora have returned to normal functionality following a significant interruption. The disruption, which occurred on a Thursday, impacted users within the United States and several additional locations. According to reports from an outage monitoring service, the incident commenced around 1:30 PM ET on December 26 at midnight IST, December 27). This outage also affected OpenAI’s API service and the Sora platform. The issue lasted for nearly five hours before the organization confirmed that all services were back up and running.

The outage experienced by OpenAI was noted by Down Detector, with a significant increase in reports for ChatGPT starting at 1:30 PM ET, as roughly 50,000 users indicated they could not access the AI chatbot. By 2:00 PM ET (12:30 AM IST), the company provided its initial official communication via its status page, indicating that there were elevated error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.

Shortly thereafter, OpenAI clarified that the cause of the disturbance was linked to an unspecified "upstream provider." Around the same timeframe, Microsoft disclosed a power issue affecting one of its data centers, as communicated in a post on X. The power malfunction was noted to impact various Microsoft services including 365 offerings, Azure, and Xbox cloud gaming platforms.

Microsoft declared that an unexpected power event in South Central US had disrupted multiple services. By 5:00 PM Eastern Time (3:30 AM Indian Standard Time)), Microsoft remedied its situation. An hour later, at 6:15 PM Eastern Time (which corresponds to 4:45 AM Indian Standard Time)), OpenAI announced that Sora was fully operational again. However, it was not confirmed if there was a connection between the two separate disruptions.

OpenAI's final update was issued at 6:04 PM ET (7:34 AM IST), emphasizing that ChatGPT was largely restored. At the time of this report, team members were successfully accessing and using ChatGPT on both the web and mobile applications. Additionally, the number of reports monitored by Down Detector had diminished to a very low figure. OpenAI has committed to conducting a comprehensive root-cause analysis to evaluate the incident.