On December 11, 2024, OpenAI services experienced significant downtime due to an issue stemming from a new telemetry service deployment. This incident impacted API, ChatGPT, and Sora services, resulting in service disruptions that lasted for several hours. As a company that aims to provide accurate and efficient AI solutions, OpenAI has shared a detailed post-mortem report to transparently discuss what went wrong and how they plan to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
In this article, I will describe the technical aspects of the incident, break down the root causes, and explore key lessons that developers and organizations managing distributed systems can take away from this event.