Cloud Outage Analysis
OpenAI Outage Cost - ChatGPT & API History, Timeline & Your Exposure
Updated July 2026 · 4 major incidents documented
Direct Answer
OpenAI's largest documented outage was 11 December 2024, a roughly four-and-a-half-hour global failure (15:16 to 19:38 PST) that took down ChatGPT, the API, and Sora at once. Per OpenAI's own post-incident report, a new telemetry service made every node in each large Kubernetes cluster run heavy control-plane operations, which overwhelmed the Kubernetes control plane and broke DNS-based service discovery. On 10 June 2025, elevated error rates degraded ChatGPT, the API, and Sora for most of a working day. Unlike AWS, Azure, and GCP, OpenAI publishes no standard uptime SLA: a 99.9% commitment exists only on enterprise Scale Tier and Priority Processing agreements. If your product depends on the API, an OpenAI outage is a full feature outage, so a fallback model or provider is the main mitigation. Full chronology and SLA detail below.
OpenAI Outage History
| Date | Services | Duration | Impact | Est. Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Jun 2025 | ChatGPT, API, Sora (many components degraded at once) | ~10 hours | Global; extended elevated error rates and instability across ChatGPT, the API and Sora; systemic rather than a single component. OpenAI published a service-disruption FAQ | Not published |
| 26 Dec 2024 | ChatGPT, API, Sora | ~5 hours | Widely reported as an Azure data-center power failure that cascaded to OpenAI, which runs on Azure; began around 13:30 ET | Not published |
| 11 Dec 2024 | ChatGPT, API, Sora (all services) | ~4h 22m (15:16-19:38 PST) | Global; a new telemetry service overwhelmed the Kubernetes control plane and broke DNS-based service discovery. API recovery began ~17:40 PST, ChatGPT/Sora ~18:50 PST | Not published |
| 8-9 Nov 2023 | ChatGPT and API (periodic) | ~2 days (intermittent) | OpenAI attributed periodic outages to an abnormal traffic pattern consistent with a DDoS attack, in the week after DevDay; Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility | Not published |
OpenAI does not disclose customer impact figures and no analyst firm has published a firm loss estimate for these incidents, so cost is marked "Not published" rather than guessed. Dates, durations, timestamps, and root causes are taken from OpenAI's own status-page post-incident reports (the 11 December 2024 Kubernetes control-plane incident and the 10 June 2025 service-disruption FAQ) and contemporaneous reporting for the 26 December 2024 Azure power cascade and the November 2023 DDoS period. Use the calculator to translate a duration like these into your own exposure. Updated July 2026.
OpenAI SLA & Service Credits
| Plan / tier | Uptime SLA |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT Free / Plus / Pro | No published uptime SLA |
| API - standard (pay-as-you-go) | No published uptime SLA |
| API - Scale Tier / Priority Processing | 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits, on enterprise agreements only; terms negotiated privately, not published |
| Compensation basis | Service credits per the enterprise agreement, not compensation for your business loss |
Per OpenAI's published Scale Tier and Priority Processing pages. Standard consumer and API usage has no contractual uptime guarantee, so treat OpenAI as a dependency that can fail without recourse. How SLA credits compare to real loss - credits cover only a fraction of business loss.