OpenAI has confirmed that a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack is the reason behind “periodic service outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has seen sporadic outages over the past 24 hours. Users who tried to access the service were greeted with a message stating “ChatGPT is at maximum capacity now,” and others, including TechCrunch, were unable to log into the service.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, initially blamed the problem on interest in the platform’s new features, which were unveiled at the company’s first developer conference on Monday, and which “far exceeded our expectations.”
OpenAI said the issue was resolved around 1pm PT on November 8.
However, the company has since updated its incident report page to indicate that it continues to see “periodic outages” via 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” similar to a “DDoS attack.” A DDoS attack, or distributed denial-of-service attack, involves trying to overwhelm an online service by flooding it with more requests than it can handle.
OpenAI did not share any additional information about the attack and did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions.
In a series of Telegram messages seen by TechCrunch, the hacking group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for the alleged attack. In the messages, Anonymous Sudan said the reason it targeted OpenAI was due to the company’s “general bias toward Israel and against Palestine.”
OpenAI competitor Anthropic also ran into issues with its AI-powered chatbot Claude on Wednesday. CNBC A message on the platform reportedly reads: “Due to unexpected capacity limitations, Cloud is unable to respond to your message.” It is unclear whether the two incidents are related.