ChatGPT’s new Agent Mode crashed under pressure, leaving premium users offline for 90 minutes.
About the Author
Qaiser Sultan writes about AI risk, crypto prices and online economies. He has covered Anthropic raising its misalignment risk label after cyber disclosures, how the Ether price looks after a brutal first half and how Roblox's Limited collectibles became real money, and he contributes to TECHi's Two Takes.
This Tuesday morning, one of the world’s most widely used AI services suffered a major outage. We are talking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The AI tool ran into a major disruption and system failure, leaving its most precious clientele, the paid subscribers, in frustration. The outage happened just after OpenAI launched its most anticipated new feature, “Agent Mode,” for its Pro, Plus and Team subscribers.
The system shut down beginning around 8:30 a.m. ET, majorly affecting subscribers on the Pro ($200/month) and Plus ($20/month) tiers. Isn’t this ironic? The ones paying more have to face such an issue, while the ones using it for free can go about their business as usual with the AI tool.
No, the timing seems a little away from coincidence. It was just the previous week that AI had launched its “Agent Mode” for pro users, and facing a week of heavy traffic, the system decided to take a break. How come you ask? Look at this, the newly launched feature equips ChatGPT to handle complex, multi-step workflows like scheduling appointments and updating spreadsheets. Now this is exactly the kind of assistance humans crave the most and that’s exactly what happened (Most likely). The feature attracted an unusual and unaccounted for amount of surged traffic, leading to the outage
According to OpenAI's status page, the interactive elements were overwhelmed by demand rather than core infrastructure failing completely.
While this fix was a little “classist” in its choice of “who to bother”, the previous glitch that happened last month, was problematic across the board.
Last month, ChatGPT suffered an exceptional 15-hour shutdown for every user, be it the paying ones or the ones not paying. In this context, one can say that today’s shutdown was nothing compared to the last one, as this one only lasted for about 90 minutes, affecting a very exclusive set of subscribers.
Yet, OpenAI’s maintenance and support system is under a lot of criticism right now. It has also come to attention that the selective user problem signals another untapped aspect that the company may be running separate server clusters, a smart redundancy strategy that backfired for paying customers.
The outage highlights the AI industry's reliability challenges and the value of having alternatives. Users seeking immediate assistance could pivot to Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic's Claude, Perplexity AI, or Jasper, all viable substitutes that likely saw traffic spikes during ChatGPT's downtime.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue and worked to resolve it, but the incident underscores a harsh reality: even premium AI services aren't immune to growing pains as they scale ambitious new features.
For subscribers paying up to $200 monthly, such disruptions test patience and highlight the importance of service reliability in the competitive AI landscape.
OpenAI needs to realize a very crucial aspect in this age of AI, which they have contributed to: at this point, users do not take AI chatbots out of service. They expect them to react to their queries like a partner who’s there 24/7 with no demands and no complaints. One AI software gets shut down for some time and calls it “Maintenance.” The user might not wait for it to get back up and move on to the other one. Sure, the paid subscribers would wait under the “Sunk cost fallacy,” but that would hinder the repeat customer and ultimate loss of revenue stream.
About the Author
Qaiser Sultan writes about AI risk, crypto prices and online economies. He has covered Anthropic raising its misalignment risk label after cyber disclosures, how the Ether price looks after a brutal first half and how Roblox's Limited collectibles became real money, and he contributes to TECHi's Two Takes.
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