Cyberattack to blame for major ChatGPT outage (2024)

A cyberattack is to blame for recent ChatGPT outages.

OpenAI confirmed this Wednesday on its status monitoring site saying, the outages are "due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack." DDoS stands for "distributed denial-of-service." The acute issue has been resolve, but the OpenAI's API and ChatGPT are still experiencing "degraded performance," and the company is continuing to work on it.

ChatGPT users started noticing issues on Tuesday. ChatGPT Plus subscribers, who had just received the updated version powered by GPT-4 Turbo that integrates DALL-E 3 and internet browsing, started noticing issues with the chatbot failing to generate images and getting error messages. By Wednesday, ChatGPT and the API were fully down for hours. According to OpenAI status page, the issue has been resolved. However, users are still experiencing problems. Down Detector (which shares the same parent company as Mashable) is still showing reports, although much less so than the past few days.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially attributed the outage to an explosion of traffic following its developer conference which unveiled GPT-4 Turbo and other new features. At 1:08 p.m. ET, Altman posted on X, "usage of our new features from devday is far outpacing our expectations."

Tweet may have been deleted

However, at 10:49 p.m. ET, OpenAI confirmed a DDoS attack in an incident report update. A DDoS attack is a type of cyberattack that floods a system with requests, which slows or crashes the network.

According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the impact of a DDoS attack "could be severe and include loss or degradation of critical services, loss of productivity, extensive remediation costs, and acute reputational damage." In other words it's costly both financially and in terms of public trust.