There was a great disturbance in the force Wednesday night as ChatGPT went down, causing college students to cry out in terror suddenly. 

While it is not necessarily on par with the destruction of Alderaan by the Death Star in A New Hope, the number one large language learning model chatbot’s downtime came as a surprise following an announcement by Apple earlier on Wednesday that ChatGPT support had come to Siri.

"A configuration change unexpectedly caused many of our servers to become unavailable, resulting in a temporary interruption of service for our products. We have fixed the issue," an OpenAI spokesperson told Decrypt following the original publication of this report. Apple did not respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

According to OpenAI’s status page, ChatGPT began experiencing connection issues at 6:17 pm EST.  By 6:54 pm EST, OpenAI posted its first update, citing the ChatGPT API as the likely source of the problem.

“We have reports of API calls returning errors and difficulties logging in to platform.openai.com and ChatGPT,” OpenAI said. “We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.”

At 7:24 pm EST, OpenAI said it had begun working on resolving the issue; however, ChatGPT and the newly released Sora video-generating AI remained down.

“ChatGPT, Sora, and the API remain down,” OpenAI said. “We have identified the issue and are rolling out a remediation. We are working as fast as we can to return service to normal and apologize for the downtime.”

It's not the first time ChatGPT servers have crashed over the last three months.

Data shows the platform experienced a major outage on November 8 and then again on December 4, with both outages occurring for roughly one and a half hours.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair

Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with comment from OpenAI.

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