OpenAI's ChatGPT, Plagued By Recent Outages, Has Now Briefly Paused New Sign-Ups Citing Surge In Demand

Just last week, OpenAI’s ChatGPT witnessed major outages, which the company said were due to an abnormal traffic pattern “reflective of a DDoS attack.” Now, Sam Altman has informed users that ChatGPT Plus sign-ups are being paused for the time being. 

What Happened: Last week, Altman informed his over 1.9 million followers that GPT’s new features from the DevDay conference have been far outpacing their expectations. 

On Tuesday, the OpenAI CEO acknowledged the “surge in usage” post-DevDay, saying it has exceeded the company’s capacity. 

See Also: OpenAI’s Sam Altman Says ‘Brutal’ Chip Shortage To Ease Next Year: ‘Magic Of Capitalism Is Doing Its Thing’

It is worth noting that while new sign-ups cannot be done, users can continue to sign up to get notifications about when the subscriptions will reopen. 

According to OpenAI’s official status page, the company has been facing frequent outages since its DevDay conference. 

On Nov. 7, one day after the event, the company faced a partial outage across ChatGPT and the API. Then, on Nov. 8 and 9, it experienced major and periodic outages across ChatGPT and the API. 

On Nov. 10, Labs.openai.com was down, and the following day, Labs, API, ChatGPT, and Platform.openai.com all became inaccessible. 

Why It’s Important: While OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been credited for starting an AI arms race among big tech companies, the AI-powered chatbot is now not the only platform making headway in this market. 

For instance, Elon Musk’s AI enterprise xAI has also launched its first AI model, Grok, which the tech billionaire has been marketing aggressively as a far more superior, advanced, and up-to-date alternative to ChatGPT.  

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