OpenAI Blames Cloud Provider For ChatGPT Outage

OpenAI has released an incident report detailing the cause of last week’s ChatGPT outage and what they are doing to prevent a repeat. The outage started on December 26, 2024 at 10:40 AM and was mostly resolved by 3:11 PM, except for ChatGPT which was 100% recovered by 6:20 PM.

The following services are affected:

• ChatGPT
• Sora video production
• APIs: Agents, Real-Time Speech, Serial, and DALL-E

Cause of OpenAI termination

The cause of the outage was a failure of the cloud service provider’s data center that affected the OpenAI databases. While databases are mirrored across regions, switching to a backup database required manual interaction from the cloud provider to redirect operations to a backup data center in another region. Manual intervention was cited as how the outage was fixed, but the stated reason it took so long was the scope of the project.

Failover is an automated process of switching to a backup system in the event of a system failure. OpenAI has announced that they are working to create infrastructure changes to improve responses to future cloud database failures.

OpenAI explained:

“In the coming weeks, we will embark on a major infrastructure initiative to ensure our systems are resilient to an extended outage in any region of any of our cloud providers by adding a layer of indirection under our control between our applications and our cloud databases. This will enable significantly faster failover.”

Significant ChatGPT outage

OpenAI’s said the ChatGPT outage was due to a regional cloud provider’s database failure, but the impact was global, as evidenced by user reports on social media from across Europe and North America.

Google Trends, which tracks search volume, shows that this may have been the largest such event, with more people searching for information about it than for any previous outage.

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