OpenAI's ChatGPT recovers after being hit with outages. Here's what ...

ChatGPT stopped functioning for many users on Thursday afternoon, with OpenAI saying that its AI app was experiencing glitches for some. The app recovered several hours later, the San Francisco-based company said.

The artificial intelligence company said in an update to its status page late Thursday night that ChatGPT had achieved a "full recovery" by 11:16 p.m. Eastern Time. 

"OpenAI will run a full root-cause analysis of this outage and will share details on this page when complete," OpenAI said. 

The company had earlier said that Sora, its video generation model, as well as its automated application programming interface — or API, which lets software programs speak to one another — were operational. But on Thursday night it said it was "currently investigating a separate incident regarding Sora," but did not elaborate.  

Is ChatGPT down?

More than 15,000 incidents were reported by OpenAI users on Thursday afternoon, with most of the problems related to ChatGPT, according to Downdetector, an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services.

The technical glitches cropped up at about 1:30 p.m. Eastern. The company initially posted, "ChatGPT, the API and Sora are currently experiencing high error rates. The issue is caused by an upstream provider and we are currently monitoring."

The number of reports dwindled to less than 50 by late Thursday night. 

Launched in 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT service can generate human-like replies based on user prompts, and as of late this summer had more than 200 million active users.

According to the company, a majority of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI's products and its API.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is among the tech leaders planning to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund, a spokesperson confirmed earlier this month. 

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