A large-scale technical failure hit OpenAI’s services this Wednesday, immobilizing ChatGPT, Sora (available for a few days) and the company’s programming interfaces (API) for almost six hours. A malfunction that occurred at a particularly delicate moment for the Californian company, in the midst of rolling out new features.
The cost of the breakdown
The artificial intelligence giant faced a widespread interruption of its services from 3 p.m. (Pacific time, therefore at midnight French time), paralyzing its entire digital ecosystem. Users encountered a message pithy once on the site: “ ChatGPT is currently unavailable. We have identified the problem and are working to deploy a solution “.
This disruption occurred the same day that OpenAI had just launched the native integration of its artificial intelligence services in the latest iOS 18.2 updatethe result of its partnership with Apple. iPhone and iPad users, who were discovering for the first time these new features allowing direct interaction with OpenAI’s AI from iOS, found themselves unable to access the service.
Even if the exact figures are not made public, we can imagine that this blackout must have weighed heavily on the company’s revenueseven if it was short-lived. Paid ChatGPT Plus users were unable to access the service for several hours, and such an outage often requires additional investment to identify and resolve the problem.
The gradual return to normal
The restoration of services took place gradually from 7 p.m., as indicated by OpenAI on its status page. Edwin Arbus, developer community manager, explained the cause of the outage: “ A configuration change made many servers inaccessible “. The company finally announced the complete restoration of its services around 9 p.m..
ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered.
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024
Bad luck, this global breakdown fell right during the “ 12 days of OpenAI », a kind of marathon during which the company reveals new features daily. These include the full launch of the o1 model, Sora, updates to Canvas and integration with Apple Intelligence. According to OpenAI, this period of intense activity would not be linked to the event.
- A major outage paralyzed several OpenAI services for nearly six hours, affecting its global users.
- The incident coincided with the launch of OpenAI’s AI features in iOS.
- OpenAI attributes the outage to a configuration issue and gradually restored its services in the evening.
