▾Digital blackout. ChatGPT, Sora, Instagram, and Facebook were down. Millions of users were left without access to their favorite services. The outages revealed the fragility of the online world and dependency on technology. OpenAI struggled with server issues, while Meta dealt with a global outage. What is happening behind the walls of the tech giants?
The online world has been shaken to its core in recent days. Outages of services like ChatGPT, Sora from OpenAI, as well as Facebook and Instagram from Meta, caused chaos and left millions of users without access to their services. What really happened and what are the consequences of these events?
ChatGPT and Sora were inaccessible for several hours
OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot and the new video generator Sora, suffered a massive outage. The services were unavailable for several hours, making it impossible for users to access all tools.
The company restored functionality fairly quickly, but the cause of the outage remains unclear. Speculation revolves around configuration changes on the servers that could have led to their unavailability.
Interestingly, the outage occurred on the same day OpenAI launched the ChatGPT integration with Apple in iOS 18.2. This coincidence raised several questions, but OpenAI denied any connection. The outage also affected Apple Intelligence users, who could not use ChatGPT as part of this service.
Twelve days of OpenAI overshadowed by outages
Ironically, the ChatGPT and Sora outage happened in the middle of the "12 days of OpenAI" event, during which the company presents new products and features every day. New releases included a fully functional model o1 for logical reasoning, a program for improving learning, a Canvas platform update, and the aforementioned integration with Apple Intelligence.
Meta also struggled with technical problems
OpenAI wasn't the only one dealing with issues. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, experienced a global outage of its services. Millions of users worldwide were unable to connect to their accounts and share content.
Meta responded fairly quickly and managed to almost completely resolve the issue, but the outage still lasted several hours and caused significant complications. It's not the first time Meta has faced similar problems. As recently as March this year, there was an extensive outage that lasted more than two hours.
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