OpenAI Apologizes For ChatGPT Outage Following Apple Integration

According to Cointelegraph, OpenAI has issued an apology to its 200 million active users after ChatGPT experienced a network outage shortly after being integrated into Apple's latest software update. The company acknowledged the issue in a Dec. 12 post, stating they were working on a fix. By the time of publication, ChatGPT was back online in Australia. The outage coincided with the integration of ChatGPT into Apple's virtual assistant Siri, available on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. OpenAI has not confirmed if the integration directly caused the network issues. Many users attempting to access ChatGPT's API encountered messages indicating the service was unavailable, with OpenAI assuring users they were addressing the problem. OpenAI's video generation model, Sora, was also impacted by the outage. However, the company reported that traffic for both ChatGPT and Sora had largely recovered by 3:53 am UTC on Dec. 12. Reports of the network failures began around 11:07 pm UTC on Dec. 11, with a peak of 1,532 reports within a 15-minute interval before the volume of reports decreased. This incident marks at least the fourth network outage for ChatGPT since June, following similar issues in June and August. The outage occurred as ChatGPT was being integrated into Apple's Apple Intelligence, allowing Siri to utilize ChatGPT for certain requests, such as questions about photos and documents. Apple announced on Dec. 11 that these features are available on most iPhone 15 models and above. In a related development, Meta experienced its own technical issues on Dec. 11, affecting some Facebook and Instagram users. Meta reported that by 10:26 pm UTC, they had resolved 99% of the issues and were conducting final checks.