ChatGPT and Sora go down in major global "elevated error rate" outage

ChatGPT and OpenAI's video-making model Sora have gone down in a major global outage.

Earlier on June 10 at 9 am UK time, people started reporting issues with OpenAI's GenAI models and were shown messages like "error in message stream or "hmm...something seems to have gone wrong."

OpenAI later admitted to problems impacting Sora and ChatGPT.

"We’re currently experiencing issues," OpenAI wrote on its status page.

It said they were "elevated error rates on Sora" and OpenAI APIs, as well as ChatGPT. Other users were suffering latency.

"We are investigating the issue for the listed services," OpenAI added.

The outage has forced people to do their own work for once rather than using AI.

On X, a user called Grace wrote: "ChatGPT is down….. Which means I actually have to type out my own emails at work.

"Send prayers."

Roughly 24 hours after the first outage was reported, OpenAI said it was still "experiencing issues" although ChatGPT was working just fine here in Britain.

"Nearly all ChatGPT components are now working properly for all users," OpenAI wrote. "Please note that we still see an elevated error rate with voice mode and we are working to completely fix this component."

The growing risk posed by AI outages

The outage has been hailed as a vivid reminder of the risks of outsourcing all of our civilisation's cognitive work to machines.

Yes, the incident does remind us of the complexity and accompanying fragility of modern civilisation. Human society is probably a little less resilient as a result of our reliance on AI.

Will we become even less resilient as AI continues its inexorable march through the institutions? Probably, yes.

But don't expect that fact to stop the path of progress. We should probably get used to outages like this, because there's a lot more on the way.

And, as AI gains more responsibility in areas like critical national infrastructure, they could do a lot more damage.

READ MORE: OpenAI outage: ChatGPT went down and people lost their sh*t

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