ChatGPT Puts Paid Plan Signups on Pause as Systems Strain

If there was any doubt that the new capabilities and features that OpenAI unveiled at its first last week were compelling, the suspension of new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions should put them to rest.

“The surge in usage post devday has exceeded our capacity and we want to make sure everyone has a great experience,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Twitter on Wednesday morning. “We are pausing new ChatGPT Plus sign-ups for a bit.”

Altman said the company prioritized a smooth user experience, and that interested customers can sign up to be notified when they’ll be able to subscribe again.

Last Monday, Altman took the stage and announced several upgrades to its existing products, including the latest version of ChatGPT, GPT-4 Turbo, which introduced multimodal capabilities that allowed users to work with both text and images seamlessly.

Perhaps the most compelling enhancement was the ability to create custom GPTs, triggering a flood of new and creative ways to use ChatGPT. Hundreds of people—many of them having zero software development experience—have built and shared GPTs with the world.

Soon after the event, however, OpenAI was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that took ChatGPT offline. “We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack,” the company said at the time. “We are continuing work to mitigate this.”

The pause in signups comes a day after OpenAI updated its terms of service to switch arbitration agencies and to group its commercial services under overarching business plans. Users who don’t agree to the new terms are being told to delete their account before Dec. 14, 2023.