U.S. College Assignment Season…Has Traffic Exploded? “ChatGPT Dependency Among College Students Is Serious,” On the morning of the 12th (Korean time) at 9 a.m., OpenAI’s AI chatbot ‘ChatGPT’ server suddenly experienced access issues. Some speculate that the cause of this outage may be due to ‘U.S. high school and college year-end assignments’, drawing attention.
ChatGPT began experiencing access issues starting from 9 a.m. This issue was confirmed not only in the U.S., where the headquarters is located, but also in most regions worldwide. Following this, OpenAI posted a brief notice saying “We have identified the issue and are currently working on recovery.” In fact, by 1 p.m., about four hours later, the Korean server seemed to have been partially restored.
ChatGPT experiencing connection problems is not unprecedented. Last month, there was a major server outage, and last August, the web page itself was completely inaccessible, causing confusion. However, whenever connection issues arose, OpenAI’s quick response usually resulted in recovery being completed within 1-2 hours.
The cause of server instability is presumed to be excessive access traffic. According to information released by OpenAI, the weekly number of ChatGPT users has already surpassed 300 million, and as of last year, it is estimated that over 2.2 million users were using it in Korea alone.
ChatGPT operates by directly receiving queries (information search requests) from paid accounts or providing an application programming interface (API) to third parties. If the request volume becomes concentrated at certain times, there is a risk of overloading the processing operations.
Due to this, some local netizens speculate that ‘U.S. high school and college students’ may be the cause of this access issue. According to the U.S. educational curriculum, it is time for both college and high school students to submit essay-format year-end assignments. It’s speculated that tens of millions of students flocked to ChatGPT to complete their assignments, which might have led to the server crashing.
Posts on social networking services such as X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit include messages believed to be from students, such as “I won’t be able to do my homework because ChatGPT is down” and “I’ve realized how much I’ve been relying on ChatGPT.”
ChatGPT has penetrated various industrial sectors, from office work to professional services and coding tasks, but the most fundamental changes have occurred in ‘education.’
Earlier this year, the American higher education media ‘Intelligent’ reported, “Launched in 2022, ChatGPT had the greatest impact on college education,” and pointed out, “In a survey conducted by our magazine until February this year with students from 588 universities across the U.S., 69% of respondents said they were already relying on ChatGPT for formal essay assignments.” Moreover, 29% of respondents said they entrusted the entire essay to ChatGPT.