Longtime partners OpenAI and Microsoft both indicated they were suffering from outages for key products on Monday, though there were no reports that the outages were connected.
OpenAI said ChatGPT Work, its enterprise artificial intelligence agent, has been experiencing elevated errors and latency for roughly three hours. Microsoft said it was having issues with Exchange Online. "Users across multiple subscription plans may be unable to start or continue tasks in ChatGPT Work," OpenAI said on its status page. "We are continuing work on implementing a mitigation."As of 2:24 p.m. ET on Monday, over 1,100 users reported issues with OpenAI's products on Downdetector, a website that tracks outages. For Microsoft Outlook, the number shortly after that was close to 4,600. Both peaked a little earlier in the day. "ChatGPT Work isn't working right now," OpenAI's ChatGPT account wrote in a post on X. "Sorry about that, we're working on a fix!"
In July, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Work, an enterprise agent that directly competes with Anthropic's Claude Cowork. The agent is designed to help staffers take on more "ambitious tasks," like creating polished slides, web apps, sheets, documents and carrying out other complex projects.
Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, providing the software giant with an early foothold in AI, three years before the launch of ChatGPT. That investment later swelled to $13 billion as the strategic relationship tightened, but more recently the two companies have been competing on multiple fronts.
"We've confirmed that users may experience degraded functionality with various Exchange Online functionalities," Microsoft said on X through its 365 status account. "We're reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the source of the issue."
