OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora are not usually the names we see when we hear news of services suffering outages, but it looks like their turn is now. The company has acknowledged that both services had an issue with high error rates. The latter has been fixed and is fully operational, but at the time of writing the former is still recovering.
According to the company’s status page, the source of the problem was “an upstream provider”. OpenAI didn’t identify the upstream provider in question, but Microsoft did also suffer a power issue at one of its data centres around the same time ChatGPT and Sora started facing problems. Though according to The Verge, this data centre outage only mainly affected those in North America.
Other reports indicate that ChatGPT specifically has been prone to suffering outages in recent times. 9to5Mac reported one such incident when Apple launched iOS 18.2, which saw the service getting integrated into Siri. Both the the chatbot, as well as Sora, were brought to their knees when OpenAI added the features of the latter to subscribers of the former.
For what it’s worth, we shot a few questions down ChatGPT’s way and it seems to be behaving in its usual way. That being said, it could not load chat histories, which would probably line up with the company stating that it is still recovering.
(Source: OpenAI, The Verge, 9to5Mac, Microsoft / X)
