OpenAI Services Experience Major 6-Hour Outage Affecting ChatGPT and Sora
What Happened
OpenAI’s flagship services—including ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer API—faced significant downtime starting at 3 PM PT on Wednesday, December 11, 2024. According to the company’s status page, full service wasn’t restored until approximately 9 PM PT.
“ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered.”
Service Restoration Timeline
- 3:00 PM PT: Outage begins
- 7:00 PM PT: Services start gradually coming back online
- 9:00 PM PT: Full restoration confirmed
During the outage, users attempting to access ChatGPT were met with an error message:
“ChatGPT is currently unavailable. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.”
Root Cause and Official Statement
OpenAI attributed the disruption to a configuration change that rendered multiple servers inaccessible. Edwin Arbus, OpenAI’s developer community lead, clarified via X post:
“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.”
Impact on Recent Launches
The outage occurred during two significant OpenAI developments:
- Apple Intelligence Integration: Coinciding with the iOS 18.2 release containing ChatGPT integration
- Sora Public Launch: Following the video generation tool’s December 9 debut that saw overwhelming demand
Broader Tech Outage Context
The incident followed:
- Meta’s global service interruption earlier that day
- OpenAI’s “12 Days of OpenAI” promotional event (day 5)
Recent OpenAI Product Releases
Despite the outage, OpenAI has maintained an aggressive release schedule:
- o1 reasoning model full release
- Reinforcement fine-tuning research program
- Sora public launch
- Canvas updates
- Apple Intelligence integration
For ongoing updates, users can monitor OpenAI’s status page and official Twitter account.
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