Global Outage Cripples ChatGPT and Sora — OpenAI Scrambles to Fix Issue Impacting Millions

OpenAI’s flagship services, ChatGPT and Sora, have suffered a major global outage, leaving millions of users in the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Australia locked out of their favourite AI tools for over five hours and counting. The issue has disrupted everything from casual chats to serious enterprise workflows, and the frustration is boiling over online.

According to outage tracking platform Down Detector, reports of failures began flooding in as early as 2:45 a.m. ET, surging again later as more regions logged on. The error messages vary — from “request timed out” to “error in message stream” — but the result is the same: ChatGPT simply isn’t responding.

The outage affects all tiers, including ChatGPT Plus, the $20/month paid version, and the newer student tier OpenAI launched in April, which gave free access to ChatGPT Plus for U.S. and Canadian students. With the academic year still in session for many, students relying on the AI for research, studying, or writing assistance have been left in the lurch.

OpenAI has acknowledged the issue and stated on its status page: “Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate this issue.” As of this writing, there’s no estimated timeline for a fix.

Sora, OpenAI’s highly anticipated video generator, is also partially down. OpenAI has issued a brief statement that the issue is being investigated, though updates remain scarce. With 21 system components flagged for ChatGPT and 4 for Sora, the scale of the disruption appears significant.

The incident has sparked speculation about potential causes. Users and rival AIs alike have weighed in, with Google’s Gemini suggesting possible culprits ranging from internal server errors to traffic overloads or even cyberattacks. While DDoS attacks haven’t been confirmed, the erratic behavior and duration of the outage have made it a viable concern among cybersecurity circles.

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As frustration mounts, memes and complaints have flooded platforms like X (formerly Twitter), with hashtags like #ChatGPTDown and #OpenAI trending globally. Meanwhile, competitors such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s Grok are seeing an uptick in usage as users seek temporary alternatives.

For enterprise users, there are unverified reports that the service may still be working intermittently, but for most, the silence from ChatGPT is deafening.

With over 500 million users worldwide, OpenAI’s tools have become daily essentials for students, professionals, developers, and creatives alike. Today’s outage serves as a stark reminder of the dependence modern life has developed on generative AI, and the vulnerabilities that come with it.