DDoS Attack Likely Behind ChatGPT’s Major Outage: OpenAI

At OpenAI’s first-ever developer conference, the company made several key announcements including the release of a new GPT-4 Turbo model. It also unveiled GPTs, a custom version of ChatGPT that you can create for any task you want. OpenAI added that APIs would be available right away and new features shall go live by Monday. However, as it has come to light, OpenAI is struggling to keep ChatGPT up and running. It appears ChatGPT is suffering a major outage because of a DDoS attack by malicious actors. Here are all the details behind ChatGPT’s recent outages.

ChatGPT Grappling with DDoS Attack

ChatGPT started facing operational issues on November 8 and it resulted in a major outage by the end of the day. According to OpenAI’s Status dashboard, ChatGPT is still facing “periodic outages across ChatGPT and the API.” Now, in a statement, OpenAI states, “We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.”

In case you are unaware, a DDoS attack (Distributed Denial-of-Service) is a kind of cyber-attack by malicious parties that overwhelms the server with massive inbound traffic from various sources, bringing the whole service to a standstill. OpenAI is still finding a way to mitigate this attack.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweeted yesterday “We were planning to go live with GPTs for all subscribers Monday but still haven’t been able to. we are hoping to soon.” It seems like the company is still reeling under heavy traffic, and it may take some more time to fix the issue at hand. It’s worth noting that this is for the first time, a DDoS attack has impacted ChatGPT’s service.

So far, the company has made several changes to recover the service. If you are still getting errors while loading ChatGPT, you can check out some of these ChatGPT alternatives in the meantime. We have been relying on Google Bard, and it’s pretty good as well.