OpenAI's popular AI-powered services, including ChatGPT and Sora, experienced a significant outage on Thursday, leaving users unable to access the platforms for over an hour. According to OpenAI, the outage began at 11 AM PT and was still ongoing at the time of publishing, around 12:40 PM PT.

This is not the first time OpenAI's services have gone down this month. Just two weeks ago, the company faced a similar outage, which it attributed to a new telemetry service that had gone awry. That outage lasted for roughly six hours, an unusually long disruption compared to the typical hour or two.

When attempting to access ChatGPT and Sora on Thursday afternoon, TechCrunch received error messages, indicating that the services were indeed unavailable. OpenAI's status page confirmed the outage, citing an issue with one of its upstream providers as the cause. However, the company did not provide further details on the nature of the problem or when the services would be operational again.

Despite the outage, popular services that rely on OpenAI's API, such as Perplexity and Siri's Apple Intelligence integration, did not appear to be affected, according to their respective status pages and TechCrunch's testing. This suggests that the issue was isolated to OpenAI's developer-facing API and did not have a broader impact on the ecosystem.

The outage highlights the importance of reliable infrastructure and contingency planning for AI-powered services, which are increasingly becoming integral to various industries and applications. As AI adoption continues to grow, the need for robust and resilient systems will become even more critical to ensure uninterrupted service and maintain user trust.

In the meantime, OpenAI has assured users that it is actively working on a fix for the issue, although no timeline has been provided for when the services will be restored. As the company continues to investigate and resolve the problem, users will be eagerly awaiting the return of these popular AI-powered platforms.

The incident serves as a reminder of the complexities and challenges involved in developing and maintaining AI-powered services, and the need for companies like OpenAI to prioritize infrastructure reliability and transparency to maintain user trust and confidence.