OpenAI blames targeted DDoS attack for ongoing ChatGPT outages
Nickie Louise
Posted On November 9, 2023
OpenAI has been experiencing major outages within the last 24 hours. Now, the maker of the popular ChatGPT is blaming the outage on a targeted distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack for the ongoing ChatGPT outage.
In a statement released on Thursday, OpenAI explained that recent “periodic outages” were the result of DDoS attacks directed at its API and ChatGPT services within the past 24 hours.
These intermittent service disruptions occurred in the wake of Wednesday’s outage that affected OpenAI’s tools and services, impacting the chatbot used by over 100 million weekly active users and the API utilized by more than two million developers.
While the company didn’t immediately disclose specific details regarding the cause of these incidents, OpenAI confirmed earlier today that they were indeed the result of ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
“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 said in an update on Wednesday evening, just before 11 p.m. EST.
Users affected by these issues encountered error messages such as “something seems to have gone wrong,” with ChatGPT displaying “There was an error generating a response” for their queries.
These outages follow a recent major ChatGPT outage that also affected its Application Programming Interface (API) on Wednesday, along with partial ChatGPT service disruptions on Tuesday and increased error rates for DALL-E on Monday.
A notice displayed on ChatGPT’s interface during yesterday’s incident warned users of the exceptionally high demand, requesting patience as the company works on scaling its systems to manage the increased load.
“We’re experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems,” a banner displayed across ChatGPT’s interface warned users during yesterday’s incident.
The outages also coincide with recent reports of difficulties generating images using ChatGPT’s integration with DALL-E 3, raising questions about the potential interconnectedness of these disruptions. However, OpenAI maintains that its systems are fully operational, suggesting that the issues may be isolated to the ChatGPT platform itself. The company currently has over 100 million users.
