ChatGPT crashed because of an 18-year-old bug in GNU libunwind
openai fixed mysterious chatgpt crashes by identifying an 18-year-old race condition in the gnu libunwind library and silent hardware corruption on an azure host, ensuring reliability for data-heavy ai infrastructure.
openai resolved rare but critical crashes in its rockset-based retrieval infrastructure by analyzing the entire population of core dumps rather than inspecting individual failures. the investigation revealed that the instability stemmed from two simultaneous sources: a specific azure host performing math incorrectly due to hardware failure and a race condition in the widely used gnu libunwind library that corrupted the stack pointer register. this 18-year-old bug in libunwind, which handles stack unwinding for c++ exceptions, caused the instruction pointer to jump to non-executable memory addresses when processing high-load tasks. by updating the library and decommissioning the faulty hardware, openai secured the stability of the real-time search and indexing features that allow chatgpt to access external data.