OpenAI Services Outage
In Brief
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT, APIs, and Sora video service experienced a global outage starting around 3 a.m. EST.
- The service remained down for approximately three hours at the time of reporting.
- OpenAI acknowledged “elevated error rates and latency” on its status page while investigating.
- Only OpenAI Playground remained operational.
- DownDetector reported over 200 complaints, with 93% related to ChatGPT.
- OpenAI did not immediately acknowledge the outage on its X account.
OpenAI confirmed a widespread outage affecting its ChatGPT service, APIs, and Sora video generation tool. According to the company’s status page, users began encountering elevated error rates and latency around 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. As of the report, these issues had persisted for three hours.
“Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services,” the company posted. “We are continuing to investigate the issue.” ChatGPT prompts sent through a paid account resulted in “Error in message stream” responses in both the mobile app and browser.
OpenAI’s Playground, which allows users to fine-tune AI models, continued to function. DownDetector reflects the widespread impact, with nearly all complaints (93%) specifically citing issues with ChatGPT.
OpenAI has previously experienced outages or degraded performance. Significant slowdowns occurred shortly after expanding access to the GPT-4o model to free users. Following integration of ChatGPT with Apple Intelligence in December, another outage occurred. In November 2023, the company suffered a suspected Russian-linked DDoS attack.
Researchers have also observed a general decline in the reliability of the ChatGPT service over time, contrasting with the company’s stated commitment to continuous improvement of its large language models.
Historical Context
OpenAI’s infrastructure faces recurring challenges. A service outage occurred last year after expanding GPT-4o access, and another followed its integration into Apple Intelligence. In November 2023, the company survived a distributed denial of service attack. Despite occasional restorations indicated on the official status page, the overall user experience has sometimes been described as declining.
Source: OpenAI operational status page
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