ChatGPT and Sora faced major outages this month

OpenAI experienced an outage affecting its popular services, including ChatGPT, Sora, and its developer-facing API, beginning at around 12.30 a.m Bangladesh time on 27 December.

According to the company's status page, services were mostly restored by 5.15 a.m Bangladesh time. "ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we've recovered," OpenAI stated in a post on X.

During the downtime, users attempting to access ChatGPT encountered error messages, with the company noting on its status page that it had identified the issue and was working on a fix.

The outage coincided with OpenAI's launch of its integration with Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2, sparking reports from users on social media that ChatGPT functionality within Apple Intelligence was also disrupted. OpenAI clarified that the outage was unrelated to its integration with Apple or its ongoing "12 Days of OpenAI" event.

Edwin Arbus, OpenAI's developer community lead, explained the cause of the outage by posting on X stating, "We made a config change that caused many servers to become unavailable."

Earlier in December, ChatGPT also faced widespread outages for hours. In June, the platform was also down for a few hours. The outage is the latest in a series of service interruptions among major tech platforms, with Meta services also experiencing a global disruption earlier on Wednesday.