What's going on? OpenAI temporarily suspends new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions.

Just three hours ago, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman suddenly announced that registration for ChatGPT Plus accounts has been temporarily suspended due to an overwhelming increase in traffic that exceeded the server's capacity.

Altman explained this on X:

Due to the surge in usage of ChatGPT beyond our capacity, we want to ensure that everyone has a good experience.

You can still sign up for ChatGPT within the app to receive a notification when ChatGPT Plus is available again.

Currently, regular ChatGPT accounts can still be registered, but when attempting to purchase the Plus service, users will be prompted with a message stating that they are on a waiting list, with the reason being that the upgrade service has been temporarily suspended due to high demand.

Sam Altman's decision is not surprising, considering that just a week ago, the entire website was overwhelmed after the "upgrade bombshell" of ChatGPT.

On November 7th, at OpenAI's first Developer Day, GPT-4 Turbo, Custom GPT, and the GPT Store were introduced one after another, which greatly excited netizens. Once they went live, the platform was flooded with eager users wanting to try them out, so it was expected that the usage of ChatGPT would skyrocket.

This also led to a global outage of ChatGPT and the API on November 8th, with intermittent disruptions lasting for over two hours.

Sam Altman personally apologized, stating that the server overload was due to its overwhelming popularity. Originally, OpenAI had planned to enable GPTs for Plus paying users on Monday, but due to the excessive load, the service was delayed for several days:

After experiencing over two hours of server crashes, on November 10th, Altman announced that the Custom GPTs feature is now fully available to all ChatGPT Plus users. Custom GPTs is a heavyweight feature introduced by OpenAI at the Developer Conference, which allows users to build ChatGPT assistants for specific fields such as law, writing, and marketing without any code, with full support for visual click operations.

Users only need to provide ChatGPT with dialogue instructions and additional knowledge data, and then choose whether they need multimodal functions such as web search, data analysis, and image generation.

The number of GPT applications collected on various online platforms has exceeded 3,000, and the popularity of the new feature can be foreseen. Currently, ChatGPT has stopped upgrading due to server overload.

Netizen: Will the price increase?

OpenAI's move has caused a stir among netizens. Some netizens expressed their happiness, saying, "I registered a long time ago."

Some netizens said that it is the first time they have seen a startup actively stop paid registration, which is really crazy!

Some netizens recalled the scene when ChatGPT first went online, and it felt familiar.

There are even winners selling ChatGPT accounts directly.

Some netizens even said that the current speed is too slow and they are waiting for Altman to launch more paid options.

Some netizens are asking Google to do something: "The opportunity has come, let's wait for Google to do something."