iOS 18.2’s launch didn’t cause the ChatGPT outage…probably

Earlier this week, Apple releases iOS 18.2 introduces new built-in features ChatGPT integration. Soon after, ChatGPT and other OpenAI services experienced major outages. Are these two incidents related? This is OpenAI’s official answer.

OpenAI’s explanation rules out iOS 18.2 as a direct cause

OpenAI released a postmortem of the service outage on December 11, which was outage for more than four hours.

This is the official explanation:

This issue stems from a new telemetry service deployment that inadvertently overwhelms the Kubernetes control plane, causing cascading failures on critical systems… This incident is the result of an internal change to roll out new telemetry in our queue, and was not caused by security incident or recently launched.

The post notes that ChatGPT and the company’s other products began downgrading at 3:16 p.m. — roughly two hours after iOS 18.2 was released.

The timing was extremely coincidental, leading many to wonder whether the impact of the new iOS rollout had accidentally overwhelmed OpenAI’s servers.

But OpenAI officially says no. The reason is that new monitoring tools are rolled out that are inherently misconfigured and unintentionally burden the system.

OpenAI outage unanswered questions

What I’m curious about, though, is that the postmortem doesn’t directly address this issue, and that’s why the new telemetry service was deployed in the first place.

Is this related to the release of iOS 18.2?

We’re not sure, and OpenAI’s interrupt explanation doesn’t address this issue.

But even if the deployment is related to iOS 18.2, the outage is still technically not a bug in Apple’s software release.

The problem isn’t too much traffic from iPhone users eager to get ChatGPT included. New Apple smart upgrade.

Rather, it’s a monitoring tool gone wrong. It just seems like very unfortunate timing.

What do you think of the explanation for OpenAI’s outage? Let us know in the comments.

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