MANILA, Philippines – OpenAI announced during an outage of ChatGPT on Thursday, November 9, that it was possible it was dealing with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

A distributed denial of service attack is an attempt to disrupt the normal operations of a site or online service by flooding it, or its supporting infrastructure, with traffic from various sources.

In this case, OpenAI’s Status page for ChatGPT mentions it was “dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack,” and work was continuing on mitigating the issue.

The first update was made on November 8, 2023, 12:03 pm, Pacific Standard Time, stating that they are “currently investigating the issue.” Subsequent updates on monitoring and deployment of a fix were made, but the later updates say that there are still periodic outages.

Australian cybersecurity site, CyberDaily.au, in a report on the outage, said threat actors were claiming responsibility for the outage on ChatGPT. “The alleged attack appears to have been a collaborative effort between SkyNet and Anonymous Sudan, two groups that have worked together in the past to launch attacks on large firms such as Apple, Telegram and Azure,” the report went on to say. – Rappler.com