ChatGPT stopped working for many users on Thursday afternoon, when the chatbot suddenly couldn’t respond to queries, with some users seeing an “internal server error” message.

It looks like the outage started around 1:30PM ET, which is when reports began to spike on Down Detector. At 2PM ET, OpenAI posted an update to its status page, saying ChatGPT, the API, and its text-to-video generator Sora are “currently experiencing high error rates.”

As of 6:15PM ET, OpenAI said that “Sora is now fully operational and we are continuing to monitor. APIs are starting to recover.” The latest note said it was still working on an overall fix for ChatGPT and its APIs.

OpenAI didn’t specify the “upstream provider” linked to the issue, but its exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft, reported a “power issue” at one of its datacenters that started around the same time as the OpenAI problems and affected North America, and problems with Xbox cloud gaming.

Active – Storage latency, timeouts, or HTTP 500 errors in South Central US

Impact Statement: Starting at 18:44 UTC on 26 Dec 2024, you have been identified as a customer who was impacted by a power incident in South Central US and may experience a degraded experience.

Current Status: There was a power incident in the South Central US AZ03 which affected multiple services. We have applied mitigation and are actively validating recovery to the impacted services. Further updates will be provided in 60 minutes, or sooner as events warrant.

This message was last updated at 21:22 UTC on 26 December 2024

Just after 5PM ET, Microsoft said it had “fully restored” power to the affected datacenter.

ChatGPT has gone down a few times in the past several months. Just days after OpenAI released Sora to ChatGPT subscribers earlier this month, the video generation tool and ChatGPT went down for hours. Meanwhile, a widespread outage affecting AI tools brought down ChatGPT in June.

Update, December 26th: Added an update from OpenAI and Microsoft.