ChatGPT Faces Second Outage in Less Than a Month: However, OpenAI Says Services Are Partially Restored

Currently, many users are facing issues with ChatGPT. Reports on social media indicate that while the chatbot loads, it fails to respond to queries. Some users are also encountering an "internal server error" message. The outage appears to have begun around 12:00 AM IST, on December 27, as noted by a spike in reports on Down Detector.

At 12:30 PM IST, OpenAI updated its status page, stating that ChatGPT, its API, and the Sora text-to-video generator are experiencing high error rates. By 03:35 AM IST, OpenAI mentioned that "ChatGPT is partially recovered," although chat history remains inaccessible as they continue working on a solution. No estimated time for full restoration has been provided.

Microsoft's Role in the Outage

OpenAI did not specify which "upstream provider" was linked to the issue. However, Microsoft, its exclusive cloud provider, reported a "power issue" at one of its datacenters around the same time as OpenAI's problems. This incident affected North America and caused storage latency, timeouts, or HTTP 500 errors in South Central US.

The Xbox status page also reported issues affecting cloud gaming and sign-in services. Microsoft stated that it has "fully restored" power to the affected datacenter and that "all affected services have recovered or are in the process of recovering."

Previous Outages and Current Status

This isn't the first time ChatGPT has experienced downtime in recent months. Just days after OpenAI introduced Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, both tools went offline for several hours. Additionally, a significant outage affecting AI tools led to ChatGPT being unavailable in June.

An impact statement from Microsoft noted that starting at 18:44 UTC on December 26th, customers were identified as impacted by a power incident in South Central US. They may experience degraded service quality due to this event.

The status indicates that there was a power incident in South Central US AZ03 affecting multiple services. Mitigation measures have been applied, and recovery validation is ongoing for impacted services. Further updates will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner if necessary.

Ongoing Recovery Efforts

This message was last updated at 21:22 UTC on December 26th. OpenAI continues efforts to resolve the issue fully and restore all functionalities of ChatGPT and related services.

The situation highlights the challenges faced by tech companies relying on cloud infrastructure for their operations. As these incidents occur more frequently, ensuring robust backup systems becomes increasingly crucial for maintaining service reliability.

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