OpenAI apologizes for outage after Apple update combines Siri and ChatGPT

OpenAI has issued an apology to its 200 million active user base 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 came on 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 network outage was directly caused by the Apple integration.

Cointelegraph reached out for comment.

Many users attempting to access ChatGPT’s API were hit with a message stating: “ChatGPT is currently unavailable” and that OpenAI has “identified the issue” and is “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 has “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 was made around 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

It is at least ChatGPT’s fourth network outage since June after experiencing similar issues across June and August.

It comes at the same time as ChatGPT integration on Apple’s Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to tap into ChatGPT to provide answers when that might be helpful for certain requests, including questions about photos and documents, Apple said on Dec. 11.

Apple users can now use visual intelligence with ChatGPT to “earn more about the places and objects around [them].”

The ChatGPT-integrated Apple Intelligence features are available on most iPhone 15s and above.

Meta experiences its own technical issues

Meanwhile, some of Meta’s Facebook and Instagram users were restricted by an “outage” that occurred on Dec. 11.

A few hours later 10:26 pm UTC, Meta said it had resolved “99% of the issues and were finalizing some “last checks.”

Source: Meta

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