Earlier today, OpenAI’s services, including ChatGPT, Sora, and the developer API, experienced a significant outage starting at around 3:17am HKT (December 12), leaving users frustrated and unable to access these popular AI platforms. The disruption continued for several hours before services began to recover.
Between 7:16am HKT and 11:38am HKT on December 12, OpenAI’s services were temporarily unavailable. The company began seeing recovery for API traffic starting around 11:40am HKT, and for ChatGPT and Sora around 12:50pm HKT. By 11:38am HKT, OpenAI had fully mitigated the issues, and all services were back online and fully operational.
OpenAI confirmed the recovery in a tweet, stating: "ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered." While the cause of the outage remained unclear for much of the day, the company assured users that a fix was being rolled out.
An error message during the downtime read: "ChatGPT is currently unavailable. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix."
The incident coincided with the launch of ChatGPT’s integration into Apple’s iOS 18.2, leading to speculation that the influx of new users could have strained OpenAI’s servers. However, Edwin Arbus, OpenAI’s developer community lead, clarified that the outage was unrelated to the iOS launch. He stated on X: “The OpenAI outage was unrelated to 12 Days of OpenAI or Apple Intelligence. We made a config change that caused many servers to become unavailable.”
The timing also coincided with the public launch of OpenAI's Sora platform earlier in the week. CEO Sam Altman admitted that the company had underestimated the overwhelming interest in the new service, which led to capacity issues for many users. OpenAI was forced to limit new sign-ups as a result.
This outage followed a global service disruption affecting Meta’s products earlier in the day, although there is no indication that the two events were related.
The outage took place during the fifth day of OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” campaign, which unveils a new product every day leading up to the holiday season. So far, OpenAI has introduced its o1 reasoning model, updates to Canvas, a reinforcement fine-tuning research program, and its Apple Intelligence integration.
Despite the temporary disruption, OpenAI responded swiftly to restore services and ensure minimal impact on users. This event underscores the challenges faced by rapidly growing platforms like OpenAI, as they continue to scale their systems to meet increasing demand. The company’s quick recovery demonstrates its commitment to delivering reliable services, even under heavy usage.
As AI tool adoption continues to rise, OpenAI will need to ensure its infrastructure remains resilient and capable of handling the growing demand from users worldwide.
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