OpenAI confirmed that an issue with an “upstream provider” caused disruptions for Sora, its API, and ChatGPT on Thursday afternoon. Many users experienced problems when ChatGPT suddenly became unresponsive, with some seeing an “internal server error” message.
The outage appeared to begin around 1:30 PM ET, as reports on Down Detector began to rise. At 2 PM ET, OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page, stating that ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video tool, Sora, were experiencing “high error rates.” Sora was restored at 6:15 PM ET, and ChatGPT fully recovered around 11 PM ET.
While OpenAI did not identify the specific “upstream provider” involved, Microsoft, OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner, reported a “power issue” at one of its data centers in North America around the same time, which also impacted Xbox cloud gaming and other services. Microsoft issued a statement regarding a power incident in the South Central US region, affecting various services, but confirmed that power was fully restored by 5 PM ET.
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has faced downtime in recent months. Just days after OpenAI launched Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, both the video generation tool and ChatGPT experienced extended outages. Additionally, a widespread outage in June brought down ChatGPT and other AI tools.
