Sam Altman, the firm’s chief executive, announced the decision to temporarily suspend new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions in a post on X.

In the post, Altman mentioned that after OpenAI’s developer conference last week, called DevDay, there was an escalation in usage which exceeded capacity.

During the conference, the artificial intelligence company revealed new upgrades and offerings, including “GPTs” — custom versions of the chatbot which users can create themselves for a specific purpose.

The tailored versions of ChatGPT, which can be created for aims like generating cooking recipes or helping troubleshoot common tech issues, can also be shared publicly through the upcoming GPT Store.

People who share their GPTs through the GPT Store are also set to earn money from their creations, based on usage.

While the company has provisionally paused signups in light of the new surge in demand, Altman said in his post that users can be notified within the app itself when subscriptions reopen.

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

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The last two weeks have been eventful ones for OpenAI, not just because of its DevDay conference, the announcements, and the increased usage of ChatGPT.

In the middle of last week, the company faced intermittent outages due to an issue which resembled a DDoS attack, in which an adversary attempts to disrupt traffic to a site and/or services.

Hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility.

Prior to the outages, one of the last times DIGIT covered OpenAI and ChatGPT was in September.

Towards the end of the month, it was revealed that ChatGPT could once again browse the internet, meaning that it was no longer limited to the data it had been trained on, which didn’t go past 2021.

Underpinned by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, the ability to have ChatGPT browse the internet was first launched as a beta feature for users in May.

However, the feature was paused just two months later over concerns on how it could be used to circumvent paywalled content.

Altman reposted the relaunch announcement via his X account, adding: “we are so back.”