OpenAI is facing a surge in demand that’s straining its systems, with CEO Sam Altman confirming on Monday that the company’s latest features — including its powerful image-generation tool in ChatGPT — are pushing infrastructure limits, causing delays and performance hiccups.
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), Altman said users should brace for slower service and postponed product updates as the company works to scale its systems. “We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges,” he wrote. “Working as fast we can to really get stuff humming.”
The strain comes just days after OpenAI’s newly introduced image generation tool grabbed widespread attention — not just for its lifelike visuals, but for its uncanny ability to replicate popular animation styles like Studio Ghibli’s. The viral buzz sparked a tidal wave of user interest that overwhelmed OpenAI’s servers.
Altman revealed that since the tool’s launch, the platform has been unable to meet demand, despite engineers pulling long shifts and working through weekends. “We haven’t been able to catch up,” he admitted in earlier posts, adding that the team has been working around the clock to keep services online.
According to Altman, usage exploded on Monday alone, with ChatGPT onboarding a staggering 1 million users in just one hour. Overall, ChatGPT now boasts 500 million weekly users and 20 million paying subscribers — a sharp rise from 300 million users and 15.5 million paid subscribers reported at the end of 2024.
To help alleviate pressure on its systems, OpenAI has taken a few temporary measures. The company delayed rolling out the new image-generation tool to free users of ChatGPT and also paused access to its video-generation platform, Sora, for new users.
These capacity issues highlight both the massive popularity of OpenAI’s generative AI tools and the technical challenges of scaling fast enough to meet that demand. Despite the current bottlenecks, OpenAI says it’s committed to improving performance and restoring access for all users as quickly as possible.
