OpenAI blames DDoS attack for ongoing ChatGPT outage

November 9, 2023 ndowd

OpenAI has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service have been greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and others, including TechCrunch, have been unable to log into the service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the issue on interest in the platform’s new features, unveiled at the company’s first developer conference on Monday, “far outpacing our expectations.” OpenAI said the issue was fixed at approximately 1 p.m. PST on November 8.

However, the company has since updated its incident report page to state that it continues to see “periodic outages” across ChatGPT and its API, which allows developers to integrate the ChatGPT model into their own applications.

In its latest update, the company said the ongoing outages are “due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.” DDoS attacks typically involve an attempt to overwhelm an online service by flooding it with more requests than it can handle.

usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations.

we were planning to go live with GPTs for all subscribers monday but still haven’t been able to. we are hoping to soon.

there will likely be service instability in the short term due to load. sorry :/

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 8, 2023

OpenAI has not shared any further information about the attack and did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions.

In a series of Telegram messages seen by TechCrunch, hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan took credit for the alleged attack. Despite its name, security researchers believe the group is linked to Russia.

OpenAI competitor Anthropic also faced issues with its AI-powered Claude chatbot on Wednesday. CNBC reports that a message on the platform stated: “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message.” It’s unclear if the two incidents are linked.

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