A year after the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI endured a roller-coaster ride of senior management turmoil, with the firing of CEO Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, threatened walkouts and open offers from Microsoft to hire the entire team, and the subsequent re-hiring of Altman, Brockman and new board members. Although the software did not report any significant downtime, the rapid series of events almost felt like some kind of outage.

The question on everyone’s minds, one still lacking a clear answer: what was the source of this sudden chaos?