ChatGPT, Sora, and OpenAI APIs experience global outage
OpenAI services faced a partial outage on Tuesday across ChatGPT, Sora, and APIs, affecting users globally, but making a full recovery within 24-hours.
OpenAI has been experiencing outages across several of its tools, including ChatGPT, its Sora text-to-video generation product, and several APIs. The issue began just before 3 a.m. ET on Tuesday, with users confirming that something was amiss via the DownDetector tracking website. Users reported issues in Europe, North America, and Australia, according to the website.
The company confirmed that its tools were, in fact, experiencing performance issues on its own status page, first indicating that there were some “elevated error rates and latency” issues happening in the early morning timeframe.
“We have identified the root cause for the issue causing elevated errors and latency across the listed services. We are working on implementing a mitigation,” OpenAI said.
The issues progressed through the day, with OpenAI updating its status site around 4 p.m. ET, indicating that it was experiencing “increased errors” involving Codex, the tool that generates code. Overall, OpenAI considered the event a “partial outage.”
While some unfortunate users lost access to ChatGPT for a time, many users who actively experienced the outage were able to view the chatbot but found it taking longer to respond than usual. The Verge reporter, Jess Weatherbed, noted that the chatbot was responding with a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” message after taking some time, and failing to process a query.
In my personal testing of the ChatGPT free web version, I had no issues accessing or receiving an answer to a general suggested prompt.
By the 6:30 pm ET timeframe, OpenAI’s status tracker indicated a “full recovery in the API,” with the company detailing, “Nearly all ChatGPT components are now working properly for all users.” At that time, only the voice mode feature within ChatGPT continued to have elevated error rates.
Following up, OpenAI detailed that it discovered 14 affected APIs and 21 affected components within ChatGPT during the outage. The company released a write-up of the event, which is available for the public to review.