Photo source: FMT
OpenAI encountered a service interruption on Wednesday, affecting its key products: ChatGPT, Sora, and the developer API.
The issue began around 3 PM Pacific Time, as reported on the company’s status page. After several hours of downtime, OpenAI announced via X that services had been restored by 9 PM PT.
The exact cause of the disruption remained undisclosed initially. However, Edwin Arbus, OpenAI’s developer community lead, later clarified on social media that the outage stemmed from a configuration change, which rendered numerous servers inaccessible.
During the outage, users attempting to access ChatGPT.com were met with an error message stating the service’s unavailability. The disruption coincided with the launch of OpenAI’s integration with Apple’s iOS 18.2, leading some users to report issues with ChatGPT functionality in Apple Intelligence.
The incident occurred shortly after the public release of Sora, OpenAI’s AI video generator. CEO Sam Altman had previously acknowledged that the company underestimated the demand for Sora, resulting in limited user access and server capacity issues on its launch day.
Notably, this outage happened on the fifth day of OpenAI’s “12 days of OpenAI” event, a period marked by daily product releases leading up to the holiday season.
Recent announcements during this event included the full release of the o1 reasoning model, a reinforcement fine-tuning research program, Sora’s launch, updates to Canvas, and the Apple Intelligence integration.
It’s worth mentioning that earlier on the same day, Meta also experienced a global service disruption which affected its products.