OpenAI reveals reason behind ChatGPT outage; Details

OpenAI's viral generative AI chatbot ChatGPT was down for several users worldwide, with people posting on social media that they couldn't access the tool. The outage first lasted about 90 minutes on November 8. Then, the next day, there was another outage. OpenAI had previously acknowledged both outages on its website and said it was working to fix it. On Thursday, the company said the issues had been resolved and pointed out the reason behind the attacks - a DDoS attack.

OpenAI reveals the reason behind the ChatGPT outage

On its website, OpenAI revealed that a DDoS attack had caused ChatGPT to crash for users worldwide. The company also added that the incident has been resolved and "the status of their services has returned to normal."

On Wednesday, the company revealed the reason for the outage, writing: "We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this."

When users tried logging in to ChatGPT on Wednesday and Thursday, they saw a message: "Something went wrong. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com."

What is a DDoS attack?

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack attempts to flood a website or service with traffic from multiple sources. This may make the website or service unavailable to real users.

For example, think of a busy street with a lot of traffic. Now imagine that a group of people start walking towards the street from all directions, blocking traffic. This is what a DDoS attack is like. Floods the website or service with so much traffic that users cannot access it. These cyberattacks can be due to various factors and mean huge company losses.