On the mornings of 7/10, 7/11, 7/12, and 7/13, ChatGPT free users saw degraded performance and unavailability, for a period lasting between 20 minutes to 2 hours each day. The root cause was an increase in traffic, which led to a series of cascading system bottlenecks that impacted our free user tier. Throughout this timeframe, ChatGPT Plus users were mostly unaffected \(with some 5-10 minute windows during which the UI was slower than normal\). We’ve resolved the underlying system bottlenecks, and added more comprehensive monitoring for the future.