ChatGPT is down again - and it might have been taken offline by a DDoS attack

OpenAI is investigating reports of outages for its extremely popular ChatGPT AI tool, and it thinks disruptions to the service could be down to DDoS attacks.

The company first announced that it was experiencing issues on November 8 and continues to be working on a fix.

It’s unclear who could be behind the attacks, however OpenAI has been subject to a number of attacks recently, and many speculate that they could be linked.

ChatGPT is down – again

OpenAI confirmed yesterday at 12:03 PST – the time zones in which its headquarters is based – that there was an issue with ChatGPT, and it had begun investigating.

At 12:41, the company claimed that a fix had been made and that it would continue monitoring, but the outage had not been addressed because, at 17:23, OpenAI said: “We are seeing periodic outages across ChatGPT and the API still.”

Later on, at 19:49, an update was posted to the status page speculating the cause of the outage: “We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.”

Another disruption, which OpenAI called a “Major Outage across ChatGPT and API,” had also taken place on the morning of November 8. The company said it was investigating at 5:54 PST, and that its fix was returning “normal responses from [its] services” by 7:46.

One day before, ChatGPT and API were also experiencing partial outages for around two and a half hours.

OpenAI hasn’t disclosed whether it has attributed the attacks to any group or threat actor in particular, but Anonymous Sudan has already claimed Wednesday’s attacks.

A Telegram post at 15:05 PST entitled “Some reasons why we targeted OpenAI and ChatGPT” accused OpenAI of “cooperation with the occupation state of Israel,” calling out CEO Sam Altman’s readiness to invest more in Israel.

Anonymous Sudan also alleges that Israel uses AI to oppress Palestinians and that AI helps develop weapons and is used by intelligence agencies like Mossad. The group also accuses ChatGPT of having a bias toward Israel and against Palestine.

The post also adds: “OpenAI is an American company, and we still are targeting any American company .”

TechRadar Pro has asked OpenAI to share more information on the suspected DDoS attack(s) and for a comment in response to Anonymous Sudan’s allegations. 

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