OpenAI has indicated that the intermittent outages affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools are due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has faced disruptions over the past 24 hours. Users encountering the service received a message stating, “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and logins were unavailable for some, including TechCrunch.
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.
Nevertheless, OpenAI has revised its incident report page to mention that it still experiences “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its API, which permits developers to incorporate the ChatGPT model into their 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.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 8, 2023
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 :/
OpenAI has refrained from disclosing additional details about the attack and has not promptly addressed inquiries from TechCrunch.
In a sequence of Telegram messages obtained by TechCrunch, a hacktivist group, Anonymous Sudan, claimed responsibility for the purported attack. Despite its name, security experts suspect that the group has ties to Russia.
Additionally, OpenAI rival Anthropic encountered problems with its AI-driven 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.