ChatGPT access is returning after an outage

ChatGPT suffereda major outageon Thursday afternoon, preventing manyusers from accessingthe chatbot and some seeingerror messageslike "internal server error." The outage began around 1:30pm ET, according to user reports from Down Detector. As of 2 PM ET,OpenAI acknowledgedon its status page that it was experiencinghigh error rates for ChatGPT, its API, and video text generator Sora.At 6:15 PM ET, OpenAI reported that Sora had regained full functionality and its API had begun to be restored, but the team was still working on a widespread fix for ChatGPT and related services. While OpenAI did not directly state the cause, its own cloud provider, Microsoft, reported a simultaneous "power issue" at one of its North American data centers around the same time, which also affected services such as Xbox Cloud Gaming. Microsoft confirmed that power was fully restored to the data center shortly after 5:00 PM ET. Earlier this month, shortly after the release of Sora for ChatGPT subscribers, both the chatbot and the video generation tool experienced a prolonged outage. Additionally, a major incident in June temporarily brought down multiple AI tools, including ChatGPT.