ChatGPT and Sora are down for the second time this month

ChatGPT, Sora and OpenAI’s developer-focused API was down for an hour on Thursday and counting. According to OpenAI, a major outage occurred at 11:00 a.m. (PT) and services still appeared to be unavailable at the time of publishing this article, around 12:40 p.m. (PT). Frequent users of ChatGPT may remember that the service also went down earlier this month.

TechCrunch started receiving error messages when trying to access ChatGPT and Sora on Thursday afternoon.

On its status page, OpenAI states that the major outage was caused by one of its upstream providers, but does not provide any further details. The company says it is actively working to resolve the issue, but does not say when services will be operational again.

This is the second time the OpenAI family of services has been down in December. When this happened two weeks ago, OpenAI blamed the outage on a new telemetry service that failed. This outage lasted about six hours, an unusually long outage. Typically these outages only last an hour or two.

Popular services that use OpenAI’s API, such as Perplexity and Siri’s Apple Intelligence integration, did not appear to be affected by the outage, according to the companies’ respective status pages and TechCrunch’s testing.