Unexpected Outage at OpenAI: ChatGPT and Sora Temporarily Offline

OpenAI is currently facing a significant technical issue: the popular services ChatGPT and Sora, as well as the developer-oriented API, are affected by a widespread outage. This is evident from the company's status page. Although OpenAI has already identified an approach to resolve the problem, it remains unclear what originally caused the outage. Progress in restoring the services has already been noted as they gradually come back online. The incident occurred on the same day that OpenAI launched its integration with Apple in iOS 18.2. This innovation could have led to a spike in traffic on OpenAI's servers, potentially contributing to the outage. Several users reported on social media that access via Apple Intelligence was limited due to the downtime. Another possible factor is the public launch of Sora earlier in the week, which led to unexpectedly high demand. CEO Sam Altman expressed that the high interest was underestimated, and consequently, they were forced to limit the number of users, so not all users could generate videos. Interestingly, this technical incident coincides with another global outage of Meta services, although it remains unclear whether there is a connection between the two events. Notably, OpenAI is celebrating the fifth day of its "12 days of shipmas," during which new projects are introduced daily. Recent announcements include the full release of the o1-Reasoning model, a research program for reinforcement fine-tuning, the release of Sora, updates to Canvas, and the integration with Apple Intelligence.