OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffers major outage, Cyberattack to blame

OpenAI is grappling with “abnormal traffic” that suggests hackers are trying to swamp its services, revealing for the first time the potential cause of outages that’ve plagued ChatGPT this week.

The Microsoft-backed startup, which helped galvanize the development of generative AI around the world, said it spotted signs of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where external perpetrators try to overload a platform by repeatedly pinging it.

The startup said in its latest system update;

We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X, “usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations.”

OpenAI’s latest post follows what it called a “major outage” across its best-known chatbot as well as tools that developers use to build on its AI. The company however said it had fixed the issue, which triggered unusually high error rates across its software and AI platform.

OpenAI, which held its first-ever developer conference on Monday, has introduced a preview version of GPT-4 Turbo, a more powerful and speedier version of its most recent large language model, the technology that underpins ChatGPT.

According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the impact of a DDoS attack “could be severe and include loss or degradation of critical services, loss of productivity, extensive remediation costs, and acute reputational damage.” In other words it’s costly both financially and in terms of public trust.

The chatbot was released to the public a year ago this month, kicking off a global frenzy around all things AI. Roughly 100 million people now use ChatGPT each week, the company said at the conference, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 businesses are building tools on OpenAI’s platform.

But the ChatGPT maker is also confronting rival products from well-funded AI startups, tech giants and, most recently, Elon Musk, an early OpenAI backer.