OpenAI Can’t Take the Heat, Gets ChatGPT Plus Out the Kitchen

OpenAI halted new signups for its premium service, ChatGPT Plus, as demand for its services exceeded capacity, according to CEO Sam Altman. The jump in demand comes days after the company’s first-ever DevDay. This is the latest speedbump in the week since OpenAI’s massive release of new features, following widespread outages, DDoS attacks, and getting temporarily blocked by Microsoft.

“We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit,” tweeted Sam Altman. “The surge in usage post DevDay has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.”

OpenAI’s first developer conference, a week ago today, was hosted to instill confidence in developers that OpenAI was a great platform to build on. Part of that sales pitch included the release of GPTs, customizable chatbots developers can build on an accessible consumer interface. But these GPTs are currently just for premium users, and Altman said that audience is now capped as of Tuesday. GPTs will be broadly released by the end of November with the rollout of the GPT Store, but the timeline seems uncertain now given the chaotic week for OpenAI.

OpenAI declined to comment on whether the GPT Store’s launch has been impacted.

The company’s developer interface, OpenAI API, experienced partial outages Wednesday morning, and again on Wednesday afternoon. There have been at least five outages in the week since DevDay. That’s more outages than its API experienced in the last 90 days. Altman says this is due to increased usage, however, we learned that there was a coordinated attack on OpenAI’s servers last week, and increased interest is not the full story.

Crashing servers is not just a problem for OpenAI, it’s also an issue for developers who are actually relying on this to work. Especially because OpenAI’s servers are hoping to get a huge influx in the coming weeks, as the GPT Store hopes to attract everyday people with easy-to-use chatbots.