This week, Apple unveiled iOS 18.2, introducing a new built-in integration with ChatGPT. Shortly thereafter, ChatGPT and several other OpenAI services experienced a significant outage. Are these two incidents connected? Here’s OpenAI’s official response.
OpenAI’s explanation dismisses a direct link to iOS 18.2
OpenAI released a post-mortem regarding the outage on December 11 that resulted in over four hours of downtime for its services.
Here is the official statement:
The outage was caused by a newly deployed telemetry service that inadvertently overloaded the Kubernetes control plane, leading to cascading failures in essential systems…This incident resulted from an internal initiative to implement new telemetry across our infrastructure and was not due to a security breach or a recent launch.
The report indicates that degradation in ChatGPT and other products began at 3:16 PM—approximately two hours after the release of iOS 18.2.
This close timing has led many to speculate whether the new iOS version had unintentionally put a strain on OpenAI’s servers.
However, OpenAI officially denies this connection. The issue arose from a misconfigured monitoring tool that unduly stressed the system.
Lingering questions regarding the OpenAI outage
One question that the post-mortem does not clarify is why the new telemetry service was introduced in the first place.
Was it associated with the launch of iOS 18.2?
This remains uncertain, and OpenAI’s explanation does not address it.
Yet, even if the telemetry deployment was indeed related to iOS 18.2, the outage would not be directly attributable to Apple’s software release.
The underlying issue was not an influx of traffic from iPhone users excited about the new Apple Intelligence features.
Instead, it was an ill-fated monitoring tool. The timing, however, was unfortunately coincidental.
What are your thoughts on OpenAI’s explanation for the outage? Share your opinions in the comments.
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