OpenAI restores ChatGPT after 4 hours of downtime as weekly users surge to 300 million

OpenAI announced early Thursday on X that its services, including the ChatGPT assistant, Sora video generator, and its programming interface for developers, were back online after experiencing several hours of downtime.

OpenAI reported the outage at around 7 PM EST, stating they had identified the problem and were actively working on a fix. The downtime lasted about four hours. “We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!” OpenAI shared on X.

ChatGPT, API, and Sora were down today but we’ve recovered. https://t.co/OKiQYp3tXE

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) December 12, 2024

ChatGPT’s popularity has soared. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared on December 4 that the technology now engages 300 million active users each week. This milestone coincides with Apple’s Wednesday release of updated software for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, featuring new integrations with ChatGPT.

According to OpenAI’s status page, the latest outage lasted a little over four hours, following a previous incident in June that stretched beyond five hours, CNBC reported.

In October, OpenAI reached a valuation of $157 billion during a funding round supported by long-time investor Microsoft and chipmaker Nvidia. The company’s remarkable rise began with ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, marking a defining moment in tech over the past two years.

Earlier this week, OpenAI launched Sora for users in the U.S. and many other countries. However, demand quickly overwhelmed expectations. On Tuesday, Altman acknowledged on X, “we significantly underestimated demand for sora; it is going to take awhile to get everyone access.”