OpenAI Grapples with DDoS Attacks Causing Ongoing ChatGPT Service Disruptions

OpenAI has been contending with recurrent outages within the past 24 hours attributed to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks directed at its API and ChatGPT services.

Although the company initially withheld specific details regarding the root cause, OpenAI has now confirmed that the disruptions stem from sustained DDoS attacks. Users experiencing these issues encounter error messages such as 'something seems to have gone wrong' and 'There was an error generating a response' within the ChatGPT interface.

This recent occurrence follows a series of disruptions, including a major ChatGPT outage that impacted the Application Programming Interface (API) on Wednesday, partial outages on Tuesday, and elevated error rates for DALL·E on Monday.

During previous incidents, a notification banner informed users of high demand and urged patience as the company worked on system scaling.

Anonymous Sudan, a threat actor, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks, attributing their actions to what they perceive as bias by OpenAI towards Israel and against Palestine. They indicated using the SkyNet botnet for these assaults, which recently integrated application layer attacks, intensifying the impact on services.

Layer 7 DDoS attacks, targeting the application level, aim to overwhelm services with an influx of requests, putting excessive strain on server and network resources. Unlike other forms of DDoS attacks, these specifically stress the application itself.

The group's history includes similar attacks on Microsoft's services in June, employing various forms of Layer 7 DDoS assaults. While the group claims a specific focus on entities opposing Sudan, some cybersecurity experts suspect a potential false flag, suggesting a link to Russia instead.