ChatGPT Suffers Second Major Outage On December 27th, Leaving Thousands Without Service

A second major outage hit popular AI chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI on December 27th, leaving thousands of users worldwide without service. According to reports by DownDetector, a website that tracks online outages, problems began surfacing around 1:30 PM Eastern Time (12:00 AM India Standard Time) and continued for at least half an hour during this time.

The majority of affected users were reportedly based in the United States, but some from other countries also reported issues with the site's availability. Although reports started to dwindle after half an hour, a total of 2,483 outage reports were recorded by Downdetector.

This is not the first major outage to hit ChatGPT. The last major outage occurred on December 11th, affecting all three platforms including ChatGPT, Sora, and API. Apple's iOS 18.2 upgrade featuring ChatGPT integration in Siri was also impacted during this time, causing some users to lose access to the chatbot.

The frequency of these outages has raised concerns among users, with ChatGPT experiencing unavailability for over 30 minutes on November 8th and affecting more than 19,000 users worldwide. In response to recent back-to-back outages, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that "We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work is in front of us." He went on to emphasize the company's progress, stating that ChatGPT has gained around 250 million weekly active users since its debut in November 2022 and has seen a valuation reaching highs of over $157 billion, up from nearly $14 billion in 2021.