OpenAI's ChatGPT and Other Services Recover After Major Outage

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OpenAI's ChatGPT, API, and Sora services experienced a significant outage, affecting thousands of users. The company attributed the issue to an upstream provider and has since restored full functionality.

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ChatGPT and Other OpenAI Services Hit by Major Outage

On Thursday, December 26, OpenAI's popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, along with its API and video generation model Sora, experienced a significant outage that affected thousands of users

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. The technical glitches began around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time, causing high error rates and rendering the services inaccessible for many

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Scope and Impact of the Outage

According to Downdetector, an online platform that tracks service disruptions, more than 15,000 incidents were reported by OpenAI users during the peak of the outage

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. The majority of these reports were related to ChatGPT, which has over 200 million active users and is utilized by a majority of Fortune 500 companies

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OpenAI's Response and Recovery

OpenAI quickly acknowledged the issue on its status page, attributing the problem to an "upstream provider"

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. The company provided regular updates throughout the incident, working diligently to restore services. By 11:16 p.m. Eastern Time, OpenAI announced a "full recovery" of ChatGPT

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Concurrent Microsoft Outage

Interestingly, Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, reported a power issue in one of its data centers in the South Central US region around the same time

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. This incident affected various Microsoft 365 services, Azure, and Xbox cloud gaming. While it's unclear if the two outages were related, both companies resolved their respective issues within hours of each other.

Previous Outages and Future Analysis

This outage follows a similar incident on December 11, when ChatGPT and other OpenAI products were offline for about four hours due to a problem with a new telemetry collection component in their Kubernetes environment

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. OpenAI has committed to conducting a full root-cause analysis of the latest outage and will share details on its status page when complete

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OpenAI's Partnership with Microsoft

While not directly related to the outage, recent reports have shed light on OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft. The agreement reportedly includes a clause that would revoke Microsoft's access to OpenAI's technology if the latter achieves AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Interestingly, the contract defines AGI as the point when OpenAI generates $100 billion in profit, which the company doesn't expect to reach until at least 2029

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