ChatGPT Initial Access Outage... Altman Says "Short-term Service Instability Possible" (Summary)

Temporary Global Access Disruption on the Morning of the 8th
Altman CEO "Usage Exceeded Our Expectations"
Foreign Media "Access Overload... Caused by Technical Issues"

OpenAI's generative artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT, experienced a large-scale access outage for a brief period on the morning of the 8th (local time). While OpenAI acknowledged the access disruption, it did not explain the cause of the outage, raising concerns that such a large-scale access crisis could recur at any time.

According to U.S. financial media CNBC and others, OpenAI's access was simultaneously blocked for a time that morning. OpenAI stated on its homepage, "We identified an error affecting all services between 5:42 AM and 7:16 AM (Pacific Time)," adding, "We have identified and recovered from the issue, and services are currently operating normally."

Due to this access outage, not only ChatGPT users but also more than 2 million developers who build their own tools using OpenAI's application programming interface (API) experienced inconvenience. When accessing websites, a message stating "ChatGPT is overloaded (capacity exceeded)" was displayed.

Since ChatGPT's launch in November last year, intermittent outages have occurred, but this is the first time such a large-scale outage has been reported. The company described the incident as a "large-scale access interruption" but did not provide specific details about the cause of the outage. The company stated on its homepage that "the engineering team is currently investigating the cause of the issue."

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. [Photo by Getty Images Yonhap News]

Foreign media report that the cause of this simultaneous access failure likely stemmed from a technical issue due to access overload. The situation was resolved within about 90 minutes, but concerns remain that such a large-scale access crisis could happen again at any time.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote on X after the incident, "Usage is exceeding our expectations," adding, "In the short term, the service may become unstable due to overload."

Meanwhile, this incident occurred shortly after OpenAI held its first developer conference since its founding and announced a new AI model. On the 6th, OpenAI held its first developer conference (Dev Day) in San Francisco, California, where it announced the latest AI model, ‘GPT-4 Turbo.’ It also revealed plans to support anyone in creating customized chatbots tailored to their needs and to launch a ‘GPT Store’ where these can be bought and sold.

CEO Altman introduced, "OpenAI currently has 100 million weekly active users," and "More than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use ChatGPT."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.