In what’s becoming something of a habit for OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT is down for some users still today, with the company’s latest status update pointing to “periodic outages” still being suffered by the service. What’s more, it’s apparently the result of a DDoS attack.
In its latest system update, OpenAI says: “We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.”
It’s a major blow for ChatGPT, with this week’s considerable downtime coming as OpenAI should be riding high on the recent launch of GPT-4 Turbo.
How to Check OpenAI’s Latest Status Updates: Is ChatGPT Still Down?
At the time of writing on Thursday, November 9, ChatGPT was still experiencing issues for many users around the world, though unlike yesterday the service is now back online.
This is confirmed by both OpenAI’s status updates page, where it notes “periodic outages” are still affecting ChatGPT. You can check the latest OpenAI updates for yourself here.
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This isn’t as severe as yesterday’s full outage, which say ChatGPT knocked completely offline due to a DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attack. Let’s take a look at what that is in more detail.
What is a DDoS Attack and Why Has OpenAI Been Attacked?
A DDoS attack is a type of brute force cyberattack historically favored by bad actors.
It sees cyber criminals deliberately trying to crash a website of service by overloading it with so much traffic and activity, its servers cannot cope. The site is then knocked offline or so overwhelmed with requests it becomes unusable.
Bleeping Computer has already picked up at least one claim of responsibility by a threat actor calling them Anonymous Sudan. According to the site, the reason for the OpenAI DDoS attack is the firm’s “general biasness towards Israel and against Palestine.”
Who Else Benefits From ChatGPT Going Down?
The group is alleged to have continued on its Telegram channel: “CHATGPT link completely dead now worldwide, thousands of reports all over twitter and social media, let us see if they will admit it’s a DDOS attack.”
Conspiracy theorists may also see the timing of the attack as intriguing, coming as it does in the wake of the major new ChatGPT Turbo release that immediately stole the show from the launch of Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot, called Grok.
This is probably stretching it, to think that pro-Musk enthusiasts are peeved OpenAI took the shine off of the xAI launch, but Grok vs ChatGPT is surely the new clash of the chatbots to watch
