OpenAI pauses ChatGPT Plus signups as the AI startup struggles to cope with surging demand

Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, shared on X (formerly Twitter) that the company is temporarily halting signups for ChatGPT Plus due to an overwhelming surge in demand from millions of users.

“We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups,” Altman announced on X, mentioning that the “surge in usage post-devday has exceeded our capacity.” He noted that all new sign-ups will be placed on a waiting list. This decision comes in the wake of several ‘major outages’ experienced by the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot in recent weeks.

“We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit 🙁 the surge in usage post-devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience. you can still sign-up to be notified within the app when subs reopen,” Altman wrote.

we are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit 🙁

the surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience.

you can still sign-up to be notified within the app when subs reopen.

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 15, 2023

Altman’s recent announcement led to a significant increase in people searching for “OpenAI.” No specific timeframe was given for when the pause in new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups would be lifted.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI stated during its conference that approximately 100 million people use its services weekly, and over 90% of Fortune 500 businesses are developing tools on the OpenAI platform.

Altman acknowledged that at least one of the ChatGPT outages was likely due to “service instability in the short term caused by high demand.” As we reported last week, the maker of the popular AI chatbot previously blamed the ChatGPT outage on targeted DDoS attacks.

Founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI is a non-profit research institution with a singular mission: to forge the path toward the creation of safe and advantageous artificial general intelligence (AGI). Throughout its journey, OpenAI has built a series of remarkable AI systems, among them the influential GPT-3 language model and the innovative DALL-E 2 image generation model.