OpenAI issued an apology to its 200 million active users as ChatGPT experienced a network outage shortly after the AI chatbot was integrated into Apple’s latest software update.
“We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix,” OpenAI confirmed in a Dec. 12 X post. ChatGPT was back online in Australia at the time of publication.
Source: OpenAI
The incident occurred the same day ChatGPT was integrated into the latest version of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri on Apple iPhones, iPads and Macs.
OpenAI hasn’t confirmed whether the Apple integration directly caused the network outage.
Cointelegraph reached out for comment but had received no response by the time of writing.
Many users attempting to access ChatGPT’s API were hit with a message stating: “ChatGPT is currently unavailable” and that OpenAI had “identified the issue” and was “working to roll out a fix.”
OpenAI’s message to ChatGPT users attempting to access chatgpt.com. Source: chatgpt.com
OpenAI’s video generation model Sora was also affected, the company noted.
OpenAI said ChatGPT and Sora traffic had “largely recovered” in an update at 3:53 am UTC on Dec. 12.
Timeline of OpenAI’s ChatGPT network outage. Source: OpenAI
Reports of ChatGPT’s network failures started coming in around 11:07 pm UTC on Dec. 11, Downdetecter data shows.
A peak of 1,532 reports over a 15-minute interval came about 30 minutes later, before the volume of incoming reports slowed.
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Volume of reported ChatGPT network issues over the last 24 hours. Source: Downdetector
This marks at least the fourth network outage for ChatGPT in recent months, following similar disruptions in June and August.
It came at the same time as ChatGPT’s integration with Apple Intelligence, which allows Siri to tap into ChatGPT to answer certain requests, including questions about photos and documents, as Apple said on Dec. 11.
The ChatGPT-integrated Apple Intelligence features are available on most iPhone 15s and above.
Meta experiences itn technical issues
Meanwhile, some of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram users were restricted by an “outage” on Dec. 11.
A few hours later 10:26 pm UTC, Meta said it had resolved “99% of the issues and was finalizing some “last checks.”
Source: Meta
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