Artificial intelligence company OpenAI has stated that ChatGPT and its developer tools experienced, “Periodic outages” caused by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Users trying to access the service received a message indicating that ‘ChatGPT is at capacity right now’ while some were unable to log into the platform.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attributed the problem to heightened interest in the newly revealed features during the company’s recent developer conference, where it introduced various enhancements for ChatGPT, including the ability to create custom chatbots known as GPTs.
A persistent issue
Although the company later reported that the issue was resolved around 1 pm PST on November 8th, it later revised its incident report page, indicating ongoing “periodic outages” affecting both ChatGPT and its API which allows developers to incorporate the ChatGPT model into their applications. The last update on November 9th marks the status as resolved.
usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations.
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 8, 2023
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 :/
OpenAI attributed these outages to an unusual traffic pattern consistent with a distributed denial-of-service attack. DDoS attacks usually involve an effort to overload an online service by inundating it with more requests than it can manage.
AI company and OpenAI competitor Anthropic also recently encountered challenges with its AI-driven Claude chatbot. According to CNBC, a platform message indicated, “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message.”
Isa Muhammad is a writer and video game journalist covering many aspects of entertainment media including the film industry. He's steadily writing his way to the sharp end of journalism and enjoys staying informed. If he's not reading, playing video games or catching up on his favourite TV series, then he's probably writing about them.
