ChatGPT down for you yesterday? OpenAI says DDoS attack was to blame

ChatGPT has become my go-to artificial intelligence tool, taking the spot of Google for searches and Siri for questions on my iPhone. Imagine my surprise yesterday when I went to ask for a better way to describe something and was met with an outage.

OpenAI reported periodic outages yesterday in ChatGPT and the API, later saying that these were due to “an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.” 

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A Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack is carried out by malicious actors intentionally flooding the bandwidth of a target, in this case, overwhelming the servers ChatGPT operates on with a flood of traffic. Since an overload of traffic is known to overwhelm ChatGPT’s servers, it’s no surprise that hackers would resort to a DDoS attack to disrupt its service. 

The latest update informing users of a DDoS attack came last night at 7:49 p.m. PST, and it appears ChatGPT is up and running as usual today. 

This cyber attack comes on the heels of OpenAI’s Dev Day, the company’s first developer conference on Monday. 

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Just yesterday, OpenAI made 16 GPTs available for many paid Enterprise and Plus subscribers. These customized chatbots can perform specific tasks like a Sous Chef to come up with recipes with ingredients in your fridge or a Coloring Book Hero to create coloring pages from your prompts.