ChatGPT Faces Second Outage In A Month: Now Back Online

Date: December 27, 2024

In another revelation, Microsoft reported a power issue in one of its data centers at the same time as ChatGPT’s outage.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence startup, faced another power outage in one month, beginning around 1:30 PM IST on December 26 and lasting till midnight. The company claims it is now back online with fully functioning capabilities to ensure undisrupted usage. Over 15,000 incident reports were noted online regarding error messages, slow loading times, and glitches on almost every OpenAI product.

Users of OpenAI’s products reported internal server error messages, including ChatGPT, Sora, and ChatGPT’s APIs. All of these products faced outage issues for the same periods, indicating an organization-wide system failure.

OpenAI’s ‘High error rates for ChatGPT, APIs, and Sora’s incident report show the exact timeline of each error and its resolution. The page also revealed that Sora was facing an added individual error. After everything came back to normal, the company announced that it would ‘run a full root-cause analysis of this outage and will share details on this page when complete.’

Microsoft's power issue report is one connecting dot that leads to a potential cause of the outage. The company reported a power issue faced at one of its data centers precisely at the same time OpenAI’s products began glitching. OpenAI has not revealed who the third-party upstream service provider was.

Based on what OpenAI said in its post on Threads, the culprit can be in one of its cloud computing services, data center, networking infrastructure, or software and API integrations provider. As the majority of reported incidents complained about inaccessibility, many of them also reported slow loading speeds.

While analyzing the region-specific global impact of the outage is difficult, reports suggest most disruptions occurred in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and New Zealand. Many countries that did not report any incidents continued using OpenAI’s products without any issues, showing some kind of isolation of the incident’s impact.

The recent incidents of complete power outages across the OpenAI ecosystem reflect the heavy reliance of AI companies on external power supplies, data centers, and third-party cloud infrastructures. Compared to OpenAI, Elon Musk’s AI ecosystem faces fewer outages as most of its requirements are met in-house. However, the lack of sustainable power grids and raw materials to build AI chatbots continues to be a major roadblock in meeting the rapidly growing consumer demands.