If you've been putting off hitting the upgrade button on your ChatGPT dashboard then it looks like you'll have to wait just a bit longer to get the chance again as the company is temporarily putting a pause on upgrades due to high demand.
From the CEO's own post on X:
And from the actual dashboard itself:
It seems that the recent rapid growth, more than likely due to their first official DevDay conference, has put a damper on their servers for the time being.
It's definitely not surprisingly as the live-stream video currently sits at almost 2 million views on YouTube. It seems that the interest in developer API's and request quotas goes far beyond the software developer role these days.
Coincidentally, or not, OpenAI had a rather large outage spanning several hours shortly after the conference was completed. And while that seems to have been caused by high demand, it wasn't necessarily the kind of high demand that any web application would want.
According to OpenAI's own status logs from that date, the company was potentially experiencing a relatively large DDOS attack.
I say relatively large because, remember, ChatGPT is estimated to serve around 100 million people per week. And so far, they've been able to keep up pretty well. So the attack's needed to disrupt their services, would definitely have to be at the highest levels.
As I am currently a Plus user myself, I can definitely point out that I've seen issues sporadically pop up from time to time. Not enough to disrupt my day to day workflows, so far, but definitely enough to take notice.
With the rumors circulating online of GPT-5 already in training, it definitely makes sense that the company will have to monitor and account for the hefty resources needed to provide a large language model to the masses in the coming years.
Because we always tend to forget, that on the other side of the chatbot, there's always miles of cables and coolant needed to keep it alive.
What does all this mean for regular non-plus users for now? Well, probably not too much. You can still use the standard ChatGPT 3.5 version for the time being, which is still one of the best LLM's out there on the market.
For most day to day tasks and for research purposes, it does an amazing job and can still offer a substantial amount of resources.
As the story changes, I'll be sure to keep you updated. And if anything new appears in the Plus side of things, I'll be sure to share that as well.
Walter Guevara is a software engineer, startup founder and currently teaches programming for a coding bootcamp. He is currently building things that don't yet exist.
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