Access to ChatGPT is currently in the process of being restored after experiencing a disruption on Thursday afternoon. The issue affected not only ChatGPT but also its API and the text-to-video generator, Sora, as confirmed by OpenAI.

During Thursday afternoon, a significant number of users found themselves unable to use ChatGPT. The chatbot suddenly stopped responding to inquiries, and some users encountered an “internal server error” message. The disruption began around 1:30 PM ET, coinciding with a surge in reports on Down Detector. An official status update was posted on OpenAI’s website at 2 PM ET, acknowledging that ChatGPT, its API, and Sora were all facing “high error rates.”

OpenAI later announced that Sora had been fully restored by 6:15 PM ET, with APIs beginning to recover as well. However, a comprehensive fix for ChatGPT and its APIs was still in progress at the time of the latest update.

Microsoft, the cloud provider for OpenAI, disclosed a “power issue” at one of its datacenters around the same time as the problems with OpenAI services, impacting North America and causing issues with Xbox cloud gaming. While the specific “upstream provider” responsible for the issue was not named, Microsoft confirmed that the incident was related to a power outage in the South Central US region.

Customers in the South Central US were notified of potential service degradation as a result of the power incident, effective from 18:44 UTC on December 26, 2024. Microsoft deployed mitigation measures to address the impact of the power outage and confirmed that recovery efforts were underway. Updates on the status of affected services were promised within the hour, with the latest modification to the message made at 21:22 UTC.

By 5 p.m. Eastern Time, Microsoft announced that the affected datacenter had been fully restored to power, indicating progress in resolving the issues that arose from the power outage.

It is worth noting that ChatGPT has experienced intermittent downtime in recent months. Following the introduction of Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, both the video generation utility and ChatGPT encountered an extended period of downtime. In June, a widespread outage impacted AI tools, including ChatGPT.

As of the latest update on December 26th, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to work on resolving the issues affecting ChatGPT and its associated services.