ChatGPT outage: OpenAI and Sora on road to recovery

OpenAI said that ChatGPT had mostly recovered [File]
| Photo Credit: REUTERS

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, text-to-video generator Sora, and its APIs are returning to normal after an outage that took place on December 26.

“Most of ChatGPT, the API, and Sora have been down for a couple of hours and we’re sorry for the trouble this is causing. We’ve identified the issue and have started recovery. We hope to be back asap,” posted OpenAI on X early on December 27, before adding in a later update, “We are almost fully back online now, we appreciate your patience!”

The outage appeared to have started sometime around December 26, 2024 at 11:00 PST, when OpenAI said that it was “currently experiencing an issue with high error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora.”

The ChatGPT total outage lasted around three hours, according to OpenAI’s website, while Sora’s partial outage came close to four hours.

At its peak, Downdetector saw a little over 1,500 outage reports for OpenAI from India and more than 2,300 such reports from the U.S., with New York being particularly affected.

OpenAI recently launched Sora for general use to subscribers, shortly before rival Google launched its own improved Veo 2 AI video generator.

“Starting at 10:40 AM PST, we experienced high error rates on ChatGPT, Sora, and a subset of APIs. We began to see recovery for Sora at approximately 2:58 PM PST, API traffic starting at approximately 3:05 PM PST, and full recovery for ChatGPT around 8:16 PM PST. We are currently investigating a separate incident regarding Sora and will be updating the status page. OpenAI will run a full root-cause analysis of this outage and will share details on this page when complete,” noted OpenAI later on December 26.

This article was updated with the latest information from OpenAI