For the second time this month, OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered a major outage, frustrating users as the chatbot abruptly stopped responding, as stated in a report by India Today. The outage began around 1.30 pm Eastern Time - ET (midnight India Standard Time - IST), with users encountering an "internal server error" message.
Many reported the issue on the outage-tracking website DownDetector, particularly in the United States. Complaints surged in the early afternoon but began receding after about 30 minutes.
OpenAI promptly acknowledged the outage on social media platform X, stating that it had identified the issue and was working to resolve it. While the company refrained from naming the "upstream provider" linked to the issue, its exclusive cloud partner, Microsoft, reported a concurrent “power issue” at one of its North American data centres. This issue also impacted Xbox cloud gaming services.
OpenAI revealed that the outage affected ChatGPT, its API, and Sora. A few hours later, the company confirmed that the Sora issue had been resolved, with fixes for ChatGPT and API nearing completion.
This marks the second outage this month, the last occurring on December 11. That day, Apple launched iOS 18.2 with GPT integration into Siri, which prevented a few users from accessing ChatGPT through Apple's digital assistant. During the December 11 outage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted, "We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us."
Despite such challenges, ChatGPT continues to attract a growing user base. Since its launch in November 2022, the chatbot has amassed 250 million weekly active users. Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed that its active user base had surged to 300 million weekly.
OpenAI's valuation has also soared, climbing from $14 billion in 2021 to $157 billion in 2024. Its annual revenues are now $3.6 billion.
