OpenAI ChatGPT faces major outage amid power issues at Microsoft data centre; now fully restored
ChatGPT experienced a significant outage on Thursday afternoon, leaving many users unable to access the AI chatbot or its associated services. Reports began to flood in around 1:30 PM ET, with users encountering “internal server error” messages. The disruption also impacted OpenAI’s API and text-to-video generator, Sora, highlighting the dependency of these tools on seamless backend operations.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page at 2 PM ET, stating, “ChatGPT, the API, and Sora are currently experiencing high error rates.” By 6:15 PM ET, the company confirmed that Sora was “fully operational,” while APIs were beginning to recover. However, the chatbot itself was still facing issues, with engineers continuing to work on a fix.
Although OpenAI didn’t name the specific “upstream provider” linked to the disruption, Microsoft, its exclusive cloud partner, reported a power outage at its South Central US data centre. The issue, which started around the same time as ChatGPT’s downtime, caused storage latency, timeouts, and HTTP 500 errors. Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, Xbox Cloud, was also affected.
By 5 PM ET, Microsoft reported it had “fully restored” power to the affected data centre, but the incident underscores the cascading effects of infrastructure failures on dependent services.
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has gone offline in recent months. Earlier this December, ChatGPT and Sora faced prolonged downtime shortly after the video generation tool was launched to subscribers. In June, a widespread outage disrupted multiple AI tools, including ChatGPT, highlighting the challenges of scaling services reliant on complex cloud infrastructure
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OpenAI ChatGPT faces major outage amid power issues at Microsoft data centre; now fully restored, source
