ChatGPT Outage Caused by DDoS Attack, OpenAI Confirms
Following the sporadic outages experienced by ChatGPT users on Wednesday, OpenAI acknowledged that the chatbot and its sibling APIs had suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
For about 24 hours, users trying to access ChatGPT were shown a message that stated, ChatGPT is at capacity right now".
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially attributed the outages to the peak in interest regarding the new features launched at OpenAI's developer conference DevDay on Monday. The company later updated its incident statement, blaming the outage on a DDoS-like attack.
What Exactly Happened?The attacks came just a day after OpenAI held its first-ever in-person developer conference in San Francisco on November 6. On Tuesday, November 7, users trying to access OpenAI's API and ChatGPT experienced an outage for undisclosed reasons for about two hours, starting at 17:52 Pacific Time.
The AI firm reported a major outage on Wednesday, November 8. OpenAI's services were down for almost two hours from 0554 PT to 0746 PT. Acknowledging that it was facing high error rates, the company assured that it had already diagnosed an issue and implemented a fix".
It was on the same day that Altman blamed the outage on an unusual load on the servers as a result of the interest in ChatGPT's new features far exceeding the company's expectations.
Later that day, OpenAI reported at 1203 PT that its services were undergoing outages again and stated that it was looking into the issue. Despite the company affirming at 1300 PT that it had already fixed the problem, its services were once again rendered inaccessible to users at 1723 PT. OpenAI acknowledged at 1949 PT that its systems were weathering a DDoS attack.
We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.OpenAIOpenAI published a final update on Thursday, November 9, announcing that the problem had been resolved and its services were back to normal.
It's worth noting that the Claude 2 chatbot by Anthropic, a ChatGPT rival developed by ex-OpenAI employees, experienced outages on Wednesday, too. The error message was similar to the one displayed by ChatGPT, attributing the problem to unexpected capacity constraints".
Anonymous Sudan Claims ResponsibilityWhile it's unclear who actually carried out the DDoS attack against OpenAI's services, hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility in a series of telegram messages.
The group listed a number of reasons behind the attack, including OpenAI being an American company and ChatGPT's alleged general bias towards Israel".
The group appeared to have a strong dislike for AI in general, pointing out the increasing use of AI in the development of weapons and the deployment of AI-assisted weaponry against Palestine by Israel.
Besides these, the hackers also accused ChatGPT of being restrictive and claimed they wanted to make it more accessible for everyone". However, the validity of the group's claims remains unverified.
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