Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 18.2 into the world with a new built-in ChatGPT integration. Not long after, ChatGPT and other OpenAI services went down in a major outage. Were the two incidents related? Here’s the official answer from OpenAI.
OpenAI explanation rules out a direct iOS 18.2 cause
OpenAI has published a post-mortem on the December 11 outage that plagued its services with over four hours of downtime.
Here’s the official explanation:
The issue stemmed from a new telemetry service deployment that unintentionally overwhelmed the Kubernetes control plane, causing cascading failures across critical systems…This event was the result of an internal change to roll out new telemetry across our fleet and was not caused by a security incident or a recent launch.
The piece notes that ChatGPT and the company’s other products started to degrade at 3:16 PM—about two hours after iOS 18.2 released.
This close timing is extremely coincidental, which is what led many to wonder if the impact of the new iOS rollout had unexpectedly overwhelmed OpenAI’s servers.
Officially though, OpenAI says no. The cause was a new monitoring tool rollout that essentially was misconfigured and unintentionally taxed the system.
Unanswered question with the OpenAI outage
What I’m curious about, though, which the post-mortem doesn’t directly address, is why the new telemetry service was being deployed in the first place.
Did it relate to iOS 18.2’s launch?
We don’t know for sure, and OpenAI’s outage explanation doesn’t address the question.
But even if the deployment was related to iOS 18.2, the outage still wouldn’t technically have been the fault of Apple’s software launch.
The problem wasn’t too much traffic from iPhone users eager to get ChatGPT as part of new Apple Intelligence upgrades.
Instead, it was a monitoring tool gone awry. Just with very unfortunate timing, it would seem.
What do you think of OpenAI’s outage explanation? Let us know in the comments.
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