DDoS attack behind ChatGPT outages: OpenAI

San Francisco: Sam Altman-run OpenAI, which suffered a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack which affected AI chatbot ChatGPT and its developer tools with “periodic outages”, is now back to life.

ChatGPT experienced sporadic outages for the past 24 hours and those attempted to access the service were greeted with a message stating that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now”.

“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 on its support page.

It later said that a fix has been implemented and “we are monitoring the results”.

Altman first blamed the issue on heavy traffic on new features announced earlier this week at the company’s developer conference.

“Usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations. We were planning to go live with GPTs for all subscribers monday but still haven’t been able to. we are hoping to soon. There will likely be service instability in the short term due to load. Sorry,” he posted.

Later, the company updated its incident report page to state that it continues to see “periodic outages” across ChatGPT and its API.

In its latest update, the company said the ongoing outages are a result of “an abnormal traffic pattern” that resembles a “DDoS attack”.