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 new sign-ups on hold 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, made the announcement via a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday, Nov. 15. According to Altman, new sign-ups are paused because the platform has exceeded its capacity, affecting users’ quality of experience. Atman said ChatGPT Plus has seen a surge in usage since OpenAI’s DevDay, where it announced some new application programming interfaces (APIs) roughly 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 select within the app to be notified when subscriptions reopen. The decision to pause new ChatGPT sign-ups follows a week where OpenAI services — including ChatGPT and its API — experienced a series of outages related to high-demand and distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The pause should mean that developers building generative pre-trained transformers (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 for graphic design on 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 chatbots, 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.”

OpenAI has expanded its scope recently after partnering with startup Humane to launch a physical AI device, Ai Pin, which is a wearable AI virtual assistant.

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