On Thursday, OpenAI’s developer-facing API and its popular language model ChatGPT were hit by a major outage that lasted for more than four hours. The outage was caused by an issue with one of their upstream providers, according to the company’s status page.
Timeline of Events
- 11:00 a.m. PT: OpenAI started experiencing a major outage
- 2:05 p.m. PT: ChatGPT was partially recovered, but users may still experience issues loading their chat history
- 3:16 p.m. PT: Sora became operational again
Impact on Services
The outage affected popular services that use OpenAI’s API, including:
- ChatGPT: Users reported receiving error messages when attempting to access the service
- Sora: The language model was down for several hours, but is now operational
- Perplexity: A popular service that uses OpenAI’s API did not appear to be affected by the outage
Previous Outage
This is the second time this month that OpenAI’s services have gone down. Two weeks ago, an outage lasted for roughly 6 hours and was blamed on a new telemetry service gone awry.
Typical Outage Duration
Typically, outages like this last only an hour or two, making Thursday’s outage an unusually long disruption.
OpenAI’s Response
OpenAI is actively working on a full fix for ChatGPT and its API. The company has not provided further details on the cause of the outage beyond stating that it was caused by one of their upstream providers.
Related Services
Popular services that use OpenAI’s API, like Perplexity and Siri’s Apple Intelligence integration, did not appear to be affected by the outage, according to the companies’ respective status pages and TechCrunch’s testing.
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About the Author
Maxwell Zeff is a senior reporter at TechCrunch specializing in AI and emerging technologies. He has covered the rise of AI and the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, and can be found hiking, biking, or exploring the Bay Area’s food scene when not reporting.
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