OpenAI Claims Outage Was Due To A DDoS But Has Yet To Confirm
On the 9th of November 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT seemed to stop working. Whilst ChatGPT is prone to periodic outages from overuse, especially to free tier users, this one seemed to be a little more persistent. Shortly after an error page began to load, as seen below:
The error led to a status page which validated the periodic outages, which aren’t too uncommon as ChatGPT remains one of the most widely used LLMs, and its significant user base does cause outages from time to time.
So Who Was Behind The Open AI ChatGPT DDoS Attack?
What happened yesterday has been claimed to be much more than a simple outage, with OpenAI’s status page claiming that:
“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this.”
The issue has since been resolved, and whilst OpenAI have not yet attributed the outage, Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the attacks. Their Telegram has listed a number of reasons behind the alleged DDoS:
This is not the first major DDoS event this year, nor is it the first to be claimed by Anonymous Sudan. Just a few months ago in June, Microsoft suffered an outage, with the hacking group claiming the attack and stating:
"You have failed to repel the attack which has continued for hours, so how about you pay us 1,000,000 USD and we teach your cyber-security experts how to repel the attack and we stop the attack from our end? 1 million USD is peanuts for a company like you.”
Up to 18,000 users lost access to Outlook due to the DDoS attack.
Hacktivist groups like Anonymous Sudan have also targeted Israeli infrastructure, with initial cyberattacks coinciding closely with the physical aggression from Hamas.
Whilst an official confirmation has yet to be issued by OpenAI, this event may showcase the global effects of warfare parallel to physical destruction. Cyber security is already a growing concern internationally, but if attacks like this become more common the visibility and need for effective cyber security may get fast tracked even further.
