Openai’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot Chatgpt service suffered a major power outage in the U.S. and some other regions on Thursday. The interruption started around 1:30 pm ET on December 26 (12:00 AM on December 27), according to a report registered on the online power outage monitor. The disruption also affected the AI company’s API services and text-to-image platform Sora. It is worth noting that the issue lasted for nearly five hours, and the company updated the platform and officially ran again.
Openai suffered major power outage
According to the detector under the online interrupt monitoring platform, Chatgpt’s Spike first discovered at 1:30 p.m. ET that about 50,000 users reported not being able to access AI Chatbot. Openai released its first official update at 2:00 pm ET (12:30 AM IST) and said: “We are currently experiencing high error rates with CHATGPT, API and SORA.”
Not long after, the AI company said the issue was determined to be caused by “upstream providers” but was not specified. Around the same time, Microsoft reported power issues in one of its data centers in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) and highlighted that it affected access to various Microsoft 365 services, Azure and Xbox Cloud Gaming and Function.
“We determined that unexpected power incidents in a portion of AZ03 in the south-central United States affected multiple services,” the technology giant emphasized in the status page update. Microsoft’s services are backed up before 5:00 pm ET (3:30 AM IST). Just an hour later, 6:15 pm ET (4:45 AM IST), Openai shared an update saying Sora is fully operational. It is not possible to confirm whether these two interrupts are related.
Openai’s last update was at 6:04 pm ET (7:34 AM IST), which highlighted that Chatgpt was mostly restored. At the time of writing, the widget’s 360 employees are able to access and interact with Chatgpt on web clients and mobile applications. Reports about the lower detector also fell to unit numbers. The AI company said it will conduct a complete root cause analysis of the interruption.
