Earlier this week, Apple released iOS 18.2 to the world with new ChatGPT integration built in. Shortly after, ChatGPT and other OpenAI services crashed due to a major outage. Are these two incidents related? Here's the official response from OpenAI.
OpenAI explanation rules out iOS 18.2 as a direct cause
OpenAI published a report of an outage on December 11th that caused its services to be down for over four hours.
Here's the official explanation:
The issue was caused by the deployment of a new telemetry service that inadvertently overwhelmed the Kubernetes control plane, causing cascading failures across critical systems… This event was the result of internal changes to deploy new telemetry across our entire fleet and was not caused by a security incident or a recent launch.
The article notes that ChatGPT and other company products began to malfunction at 3:16 p.m. — about two hours after the release of iOS 18.2.
This timing is extremely coincidental, and has led many to wonder if the rollout of the new iOS version unexpectedly overloaded OpenAI's servers.
Officially, OpenAI says it did not. It was caused by the rollout of a new monitoring tool that was essentially misconfigured and unintentionally putting a strain on the system.
The Unanswered Question with the OpenAI Outage
But what I'm curious about, and what the postmortem doesn't directly address, is why the new telemetry service was rolled out in the first place.
Is it related to the launch of iOS 18.2?
We don't know for sure, and OpenAI's explanation for the outage doesn't answer that question.
But even if the rollout was tied to iOS 18.2, the outage still wouldn't technically have been a bug in Apple's software launch.
The problem wasn't too much traffic from iPhone users wanting to get ChatGPT as part of Apple's new Intelligence updates.
Instead, it was a monitoring tool that went down. Just at what seemed like a really bad time.
What do you think of OpenAI's explanation for the outage? Let us know in the comments.
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