OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Sora video generation platforms are experiencing technical difficulties and are currently unavailable for user interaction.
Reports of the outage began surfacing on social media around 1:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, which aligned with a spike in notifications to Down Detector. At 2 p.m. ET, OpenAI acknowledged the issue in a blog update, stating, “we are currently experiencing high error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora. We are looking into this and will provide an update shortly.”
Just 18 minutes later, the company followed up, indicating, “this issue stems from an upstream provider, and we are closely monitoring the situation.” By around 3 p.m. ET, they added, “we are actively working on a resolution,” but no timeline has been provided regarding when services might resume.
This is not the first instance of outages affecting OpenAI’s services. Over the past few months, ChatGPT faced significant downtime, particularly in June, impacting other services like Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity. Additionally, Sora encountered “technical difficulties” shortly after its launch for Plus and Pro subscribers in December. In those instances, OpenAI managed to rectify the problems within a few hours.
The timing of this outage comes shortly after the conclusion of the “12 Days of OpenAI” event, during which numerous new products were introduced. This included the full rollout of the o1 reasoning model—along with a preview of its successor o3—and the Sora text-to-video model, alongside enhancements to existing features like Canvas and Advanced Voice Mode.
