ChatGPT faces second major outage in December, Microsoft reveals cause
The cause of the outage was traced back to an issue with OpenAI’s upstream provider.
TECH & AUTO
OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered another major outage this month, causing widespread disruption for users globally. The outage occurred around 12 AM IST on December 27, 2024, when many users reported encountering an "internal server error" while trying to interact with the popular AI chatbot. This marks the second significant downtime for ChatGPT in December, following a similar issue earlier in the month.
According to outage tracking site DownDetector, the outage affected a large number of users, particularly in the United States, where the service was down for nearly 30 minutes. Users were unable to access ChatGPT, Sora, and API services, all of which were impacted. OpenAI quickly acknowledged the issue and stated on social media that it had identified the problem and was working on a resolution.
The cause of the outage was traced back to an issue with OpenAI’s upstream provider. Microsoft, which serves as OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider, reported a "power issue" at one of its data centers. This incident coincided with the disruptions in OpenAI’s services and also impacted Xbox cloud gaming in North America.
OpenAI has faced multiple outages this month, with the previous one occurring on December 11, the same day Apple launched iOS 18.2, which included GPT integration in Siri. Users attempting to access ChatGPT through Siri also faced issues. On that occasion, DownDetector recorded over 2,400 outage reports.