https://chat.openai.com was definitely down for me (a free-tier user in the EU) for a while today. Now it seems to be back up, but now there's a waitlist for the paid "Plus" membership which gives access to ChatGPT 4. "Due to high demand, we've temporarily paused upgrades." displays on mouseover. [UPDATE: the pause on Plus signups was actually preannounced on the 15th, https://twitter.com/sama/status/1724626002595471740 by Altman himself: thanks to naiv for this.] But maybe these are things which have happened sporadically in the recent past, too? And by Barnum's Law I imagine it quite possible that the controversy has generated a surge of rubberneckers, maybe even more would-be subscribers.

While we're looking at straws in the wind, I might as well add that the EU terms of use received some changes on the 14th of this month, though they won't become active until the 14th of December: https://openai.com/policies/eu-terms-of-use https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8541941-terms-of-use-upd... . It's not a completely de minimis update, but I can't say more than that.

[EDIT: Unrelated to outages, here's another thing to consider if you're trying to read the signs: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=38353898 .]