OpenAI Confirms DDoS Attack Caused ChatGPT Outages This Week
OpenAI experiences repeated service disruptions following its Devday event, eventually blaming a DDoS attack rather than user demand. The hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claims responsibility for the cyberattack.
OpenAI confirms that its ChatGPT assistant and APIs suffer a distributed denial-of-service attack this week after experiencing multiple outages. Engineers initially struggle to identify the root cause of the instability, which begins shortly after the company's Devday event. Services drop offline repeatedly, leaving users unable to access the popular chatbot.
CEO Sam Altman initially attributes the disruptions to an overwhelming surge in user demand following the developer conference. However, as the outages persist throughout Wednesday, OpenAI acknowledges that an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack is actually to blame. The company states that it is actively working to mitigate the malicious traffic.
The hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan claims responsibility for the cyberattack, though OpenAI does not officially verify this claim. After a turbulent few days of intermittent availability, OpenAI reports that its systems return to normal by Thursday afternoon. The incident highlights the vulnerability of even the most prominent AI platforms to targeted traffic attacks.