OpenAI blames DDoS attack for ongoing ChatGPT outage

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

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, is experiencing sporadic outages over the past 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service were greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is currently full”, and others, including TechCrunch, were unable to connect to the service.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the problem on interest in the platform’s new features, revealed during the company’s first developer conference on Monday“far exceeding our expectations”.

OpenAI said the issue was resolved around 1 p.m. PST on November 8.

However, the company has since updated its crash report page to indicate that it continues to see “periodic outages” in ChatGPT and its API, allowing developers to integrate the ChatGPT model into their own applications .

In its latest update, the company said the ongoing outages are the result of “an abnormal traffic pattern” that resembles a “DDoS attack.” A DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service attack, involves an attempt to overwhelm an online service by flooding it with more requests than it can handle.

OpenAI did not share any further information about the attack and did not immediately respond to questions from TechCrunch.

In a series of Telegram messages seen by TechCrunch, hacktivist group Anonymous Soudan took credit for the alleged attack. In the messages, Anonymous Soudan said the reason it targeted OpenAI was due to the company’s “general bias towards Israel and against Palestine.”

OpenAI competitor Anthropic also faced issues with its AI-powered chatbot Claude 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 is unclear whether the two incidents are related.