ChatGPT Owner OpenAI Says It Has Been Hit With DDoS Attack

Did you try using ChatGPT recently and couldn’t? Well, you were not alone. The AI platform had a major outage that OpenAI blames the issue on DDoS attacks. And there have been ongoing ChatGPT outages. Users attempting to access ChatGPT encountered capacity issues.

OpenAI’s tools and services, including the chatbot used by more than 100 million weekly active users and the API used by more than two million developers, CNBC reported. Over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies use the platform across industries such as financial services, legal, and Education.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially attributed the problem to overwhelming interest in the platform’s new features. They claimed to have fixed the problem by Nov. 8, 1 p.m. PST, TechCrunch reported.

OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said of the first outage, “We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.”

However, the situation continued, leading OpenAI to update its incident report page, indicating ongoing outages related to an “abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.” DDoS attacks typically involve flooding an online service with more requests than it can handle.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic, according to Cloud Flare.

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In a series of Telegram messages, the hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the alleged attack, but security researchers suspect links to Russia.

And the problem isn’t limited to OpenAI, its comPetitor, Anthropic, also experienced the same issues with its Claude chatbot on the same day.

OpenAI says it is continuing to address the ongoing outages and their causes, and has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is behind “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.

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.

Photo by Sanket Mishra: https://www.pexels.com/photo/webpage-of-chatgpt-a-prototype-ai-chatbot-is-seen-on-the-website-of-openai-on-a-smartphone-examples-capabilities-and-limitations-are-shown-16125027/