OpenAI's popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, and its associated API services have been hit by a widespread outage, causing significant disruption for users. The incident, which began earlier today, primarily affected Batch API job processing and the ability to upload files to ChatGPT conversations. While file upload functionality has since been restored, the initial downtime impacted a broad range of users relying on OpenAI's services.
Impact on Batch APIs
One of the primary issues reported during the outage was that Batch API jobs were becoming stuck in their finalization state. OpenAI's status page indicated "degraded" performance specifically for the Batch component, which is one of twelve API components monitored for uptime. This particular problem had been active since approximately 3:54 PM.
According to OpenAI's status page:
“Subset of Batch API jobs stuck in finalizing state”
ChatGPT File Uploads Affected
In addition to API disruptions, some ChatGPT users experienced difficulties with file uploads. This issue, categorized as a partial outage, prevented users from uploading files to their conversations, often presenting an error message stating the file had expired. The problem began around 3:53 PM.
OpenAI’s official explanation for the file upload issue stated:
“File uploads to ChatGPT conversations are failing for some users, giving an error message indicating the file has expired.”
Fortunately, OpenAI confirmed that file upload functionality was restored as of 8:55 PM, bringing relief to users who rely on this feature for their ChatGPT interactions.
