On December 26, 2024, OpenAI experienced a significant service disruption that impacted ChatGPT, Sora, and the company’s developer-facing API for more than four hours. The outage, which began around 11 a.m. PT, left users unable to access ChatGPT or Sora, leading to widespread error messages and service interruptions. While OpenAI reported partial recovery of the services by 2:05 p.m. PT, it wasn’t until 3:16 p.m. PT that Sora became fully operational again, and users were still experiencing issues with their chat histories.
OpenAI attributed the outage to a problem with one of its upstream providers but provided few details about the nature of the issue. This was the second major outage OpenAI had experienced in December 2024, as a similar disruption occurred two weeks prior. In that instance, OpenAI cited a malfunction in a new telemetry service as the cause, leading to a service downtime that lasted about six hours, which was unusually long for the company’s typical service disruptions.
Despite the significant disruption to OpenAI’s core services, third-party applications that rely on OpenAI’s API, such as Perplexity and Apple’s Siri integration, did not appear to be affected. Both companies confirmed through their status pages that their services remained functional, even during the outage. This suggests that while OpenAI’s direct consumer-facing services experienced major issues, its API infrastructure supporting other services remained stable.
The repeated outages have raised concerns about the reliability of OpenAI’s services, especially for users and businesses that rely heavily on ChatGPT and its API. While the company is working on resolving the issue, the recurrence of disruptions in such a short period of time highlights the challenges OpenAI faces in maintaining the stability of its rapidly expanding services. Users are advised to stay updated on OpenAI’s status page for further developments and fixes to the ongoing issues.
