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OpenAI has confirmed that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is the cause of “intermittent outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing sporadic outages over the past 24 hours. Users who tried to access the service were greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is currently full,” and others, including TechCrunch, were unable to log into the service.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed the problem on interest in the platform’s new features, which were unveiled Monday at the company’s first developer conference and which “far exceeded our expectations.”
OpenAI said the issue was resolved on November 8 at approximately 1:00 PM PST.
However, the company has since updated its incident report page to indicate that it continues to see “intermittent outages” in ChatGPT and its API, allowing developers to integrate the ChatGPT model into their own applications.
In its latest update, the company said the ongoing outages are due to “an abnormal traffic pattern” that resembles a “DDoS attack.” A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack attempts to overwhelm an online service by flooding it with more requests than it can handle.
OpenAI did not share any further information about the attack and did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions.
In a series of Telegram messages seen by TechCrunch, 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 against Israel and against Palestine.”
OpenAI competitor Anthropic also encountered problems with its AI-powered Claude chatbot on Wednesday. CNBC reports that a message on the platform said: “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message.” It is unclear whether the two incidents are related.