OpenAI says ChatGPT outages may be caused by targeted attack

OpenAI said recent outages of its viral ChatGPT chatbot could be caused by targeted attacks on its servers.

The company wrote on its website Wednesday evening it is “dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.”

A DDoS attack, or distributed denial of service, typically refers to an attacker that floods an internet server to disrupt normal traffic.

“We are continuing work to mitigate this,” OpenAI said.

Users on Wednesday were unable to access all of OpenAI’s tools and services and received a message that the platform was at capacity.

The company told CNN no user information was compromised.

The outage comes three days after OpenAI hosted its first developer conference, held in San Francisco. It was held nearly a year after the launch of ChatGPT, which helped renew an arms race among tech companies to develop and deploy similar AI tools in their products.

CEO Sam Altman said 2 million developers now use the platform, and about 90% of Fortune 500 companies are using the tools internally. It currently has 100 million active users.

At the event, the company unveiled a series of artificial intelligence tool updates, including the ability for developers to create custom versions of ChatGPT.