OpenAI Scrambles To Fix ChatGPT Outage After It Gets Slammed By A DDoS Attack

Generative AI ChatGPT has seen exponential growth in the past few months, recently crossing the 100 million weekly active users. However, with all this popularity, a target was perhaps painted on the back of OpenAI and ChatGPT by threat actors looking to make a quick buck or cause mayhem. It seems the latter is what has happened today after OpenAI reported a denial-of-service attack against its infrastructure.

On the afternoon of November 8th, users of ChatGPT began to notice some problems with the platform. Namely, when people to use the AI service, they saw a message that says something along the lines of “Something went wrong.” While that is not the most descriptive error, something most definitely went wrong as OpenAI began rather quickly investigating.


Initially, it seemed that OpenAI had nipped the issue in the bud, but clearly, that was not the case. In a follow-up announcement, it was explained that the team was “dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.” BleepingComputer has reported that the group known as Anonymous Sudan has claimed these attacks due to OpenAI’s "general biasness towards Israel and against Palestine."

The group further explained that it had used the SkyNet botnet in the attacks against OpenAI, marking another week of attacks for the network. In any event, the hope is that the attacks will be mitigated shortly by the OpenAI team so productivity around the world will go back to nominal levels. While that might be more a meme than truth, ChatGPT going dark with an outage has certainly raised eyebrows.