OpenAI has confirmed that a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack is behind the "periodic outages" affecting ChatGPT and its development tools.
ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages for 24 hours. Users who attempted to access the service were greeted with a message stating that "ChatGPT is at capacity at this time," and others were unable to log into the service.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially attributed the issue to interest in the platform's new features, unveiled at the company's first developer conference on Monday, "far exceeding our expectations."
Usage of our new devday features is far exceeding our expectations. We were planning to release GPT to all subscribers on Monday, but we haven't been able to do that yet. We hope to do it soon. Service instability is likely in the short term due to loading. Sorry :/ —Sam Altman (@sama) November 8th 2023
OpenAI said the issue was fixed at approximately 1 pm PST on November 8.
However, the company has since updated its incident reporting page to indicate that it continues to see "periodic outages" to ChatGPT and its API, allowing developers to integrate the ChatGPT model into their own applications.
In its latest update, the company said that the ongoing outages are the result of "an abnormal traffic pattern" that resembles a "DDoS attack." A DDoS, 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 has not shared any further information about the attack and did not immediately respond to questions raised.
In a series of Telegram messages, the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan took credit for the alleged attack. In the messages, Anonymous Sudan said the reason it targeted OpenAI is due to the company's "general bias toward Israel and against Palestine."
OpenAI competitor Anthropic also had issues with its AI-powered chatbot Claude on Wednesday. CNBC reports that a message on the platform read: "Due to unexpected capacity limitations, Claude is unable to respond to your message." It is unclear if the two incidents are related.
