OpenAI halts new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups amid high demand

According to the company’s CEO, new sign-ups have been paused because the platform has exceeded its capacity, affecting users’ quality of experience.

OpenAI, the company behind the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, said it has put on hold new signups for the premium version of the AI tool, ChatGPT Plus, due to a high surge in usage after DevDay.

The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, announced this via a post on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) on Wednesday, Nov. 15. According to him, new sign-ups are paused because the platform has exceeded its capacity, thus affecting users’ quality of experience. Atman said the ChatGPT Plus has seen a surge in usage since OpenAI’s DevDay, where it announced some new APIs about a week ago.

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

The CEO said although new registrations are temporarily suspended, users can still check in within the app to be notified when subscriptions reopen. The decision to pause new ChatGPT signups follows a week where OpenAI services – including ChatGPT and the API – experienced a series of outages related to high-demand and DDoS attacks.

The pause should mean that developers working on building GPTs and using the API encounter fewer issues (like being unable to save GPT drafts). But it could also mean a temporary decrease in new users of GPTs since they are only available to Plus subscribers.

Following the introduction of GPTs, developers and companies have built GPTs for various purposes, such as graphic design from Canva. Search marketers already subscribed to ChatGPT Plus can try GPTs for helpful content assessment and learning SEO.

ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI chat programs, with over 180 million users, according to SimilarWeb data cited by Reuters. But it faces increasing competition from Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude 2. On Nov. 5, Elon Musk announced that he had created his own AI chat program, “Grok.”

The artificial intelligence company has increasingly expanded its scope recently after partnering with startup Humane to launch a physical AI device, AI pin. The device serves as a wearable AI virtual assistant.

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