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Following two threat groups claiming responsibility, ChatGPT maker OpenAI has confirmed that the chatbot’s outage was caused by a DDoS attack.
The outage, which affected both ChatGPT and its application programming interface (API), was flagged by OpenAI on Wednesday (8 November), meaning its 100 million weekly active users attempting to use the service were greeted with a message saying, “something seems to have gone wrong.”
Now, OpenAI has confirmed that the outage was the result of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack,” it said.
“We are continuing work to mitigate this.”
Claims by hacking groups suggest two potential culprits who seem to have launched the attack collaboratively – the infamous Anonymous Sudan and Skynet.
Claims of an attack on ChatGPT first appeared on Skynet’s Telegram, where it posted screenshots of ChatGPT timing out, with a command window with statements such as “!OVERLOAD2_SKYNET.”
It also posted screenshots of a spike of outage reports for ChatGPT on DownDetector and OpenAI’s status website.
The images were then reposted on Anonymous Sudan’s Telegram, with the group providing much more commentary on the motivations behind the alleged attack.
“Some reasons why we targeted OpenAI and ChatGPT:
There is a major contrast between Skynet and Anonymous Sudan’s demeanour regarding the outage, with the latter much more politically motivated.
“OpenAI / ChatGPT, learn from Microsoft, we f***** them up and down continuously until they admit it’s our attack by force, and in the same way we will force you to admit it’s a DDoS attack like dogs,” Anonymous Sudan said on its Telegram.
Following the attack on OpenAI, the two groups have taken responsibility for an attack on cloud cyber security and DDoS mitigation service Cloudflare.
The company issued a notice with a stock Google apology.
“We’re sorry ... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now,” the notice read.
Cloudflare has since said that the site is now up and that nothing critical has been affected.
Once again, Skynet posted screenshots of the outage, including the Google apology. Anonymous Sudan, in classic fashion, taunted the company.
“Companies using Cloudflare, they can’t even protect their main site, you think they can protect you?” it said.
“No protection can stand in our way.”
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