March 27, 2023: On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disclosed a bug that permitted some users of its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT to witness the messages from others.

“We had a huge issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open-source library, for which a fix has been released, and we have just finished validating,” Altman wrote in a Tweet.

“A small percentage of users could see other users’ conversation history titles.”

A few users had reported witnessing messages from others as early as Monday.

One person on Reddit stated spotting previously unseen chats in the sidebar, including conversations titled “Xi Jingping’s Six Principles” and “Chinese Socialism Growth.”

Another person on Twitter shared a screenshot of their ChatGPT, showing chat titles from conversations they had never had.

OpenAI temporarily disabled the chatbot on Monday after the company heard about reports of other peoples’ chat histories being visible, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.

“We feel awful about this,” Altman tweeted Tuesday.

Altman said that, due to the fix, users would no longer be able to see chat histories for ChatGPT conversations between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday, March 20. The issue has since been fixed.

ChatGPT is exploding in popularity after its November launch. The tool lets users type in prompts to get human-like answers by using what is known as a large vocabulary model powered by vast amounts of data.

People are using it to pen school essays, song lyrics, and even generate lines of code for software.

By January, ChatGPT is amassing 100 million monthly active people only two months into its launch, which makes it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS note published last week.

It took TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users, with Instagram achieving the same popularity after two and a half years.