ChatGPT isn’t working for many users right now. With numerous reports on social media, we also confirmed that the chatbot loads but isn’t able to respond to queries, while others are seeing an “internal server error” message.
It looks like the outage started around 1:30PM ET, which is when reports began to spike on Down Detector. At 2PM ET, OpenAI posted an update to its status page, saying ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora are “currently experiencing high error rates.”
At 5:05PM ET, OpenAI said “ChatGPT is partially recovered,” but chat history still isn’t loading as the company continues to “work on a fix.” There’s no mention of an ETA for when access will be fully restored.
OpenAI didn’t specify the “upstream provider” linked to the issue, but its exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft, reported a “power issue” at one of its datacenters that started around the same time as the OpenAI problems and affected North America.
Active – Storage latency, timeouts, or HTTP 500 errors in South Central US
Impact Statement: Starting at 18:44 UTC on 26 Dec 2024, you have been identified as a customer who was impacted by a power incident in South Central US and may experience a degraded experience.
Current Status: There was a power incident in the South Central US AZ03 which affected multiple services. We have applied mitigation and are actively validating recovery to the impacted services. Further updates will be provided in 60 minutes, or sooner as events warrant.
This message was last updated at 21:22 UTC on 26 December 2024
The Xbox status page reports issues as well, affecting cloud gaming and sign-in. Microsoft said it has “fully restored” power to the affected datacenter, while “all affected services have recovered or are in the process of recovering.”
ChatGPT has gone down a few times in the past several months. Just days after OpenAI released Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, the video generation tool and ChatGPT went down for hours. Meanwhile, a widespread outage affecting AI tools brought down ChatGPT in June.
Update, December 26th: Added an update from OpenAI and Microsoft.
