ChatGPT experienced a significant outage on Thursday afternoon, leaving many users unable to access the AI chatbot service. According to reporting by Emma Roth at The Verge, the disruption began around 1:30 PM ET when users encountered internal server errors. OpenAI confirmed issues affecting ChatGPT, its API, and the Sora text-to-video generator. The root cause was traced to a power incident at a Microsoft datacenter in South Central US, as Microsoft serves as OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. The outage lasted several hours, with Microsoft reporting full power restoration around 5 PM ET. ChatGPT service eventually recovered completely by 11 PM ET. This incident follows several other outages in recent months, including a similar disruption earlier in December when the newly released Sora feature was affected.