ChatGPT developer OpenAI has admitted the cause of intermittent outages of its flagship generative AI offering over the past day: distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
According to the developer’s status page, ChatGPT and its API have been suffering from “periodic outages” since November 8 around noon PST.
The most recent update was on November 8 at 7:49 p.m. PST. “We are experiencing periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflecting a DDoS attack. We are continuing our efforts to mitigate this issue. OpenAI said.
Although the app appeared to be functioning normally at the time of writing, affected users turned to X (formerly Twitter) en masse to complain. A person using the API confirmed a “429 – Too Many Requests” error, which would match OpenAI’s diagnosis that DDoS is the cause of the problem.
Hacktivists claim responsibility
Hacktivist group Anonymous Soudan took to Telegram to claim responsibility for the attacks.
In addition to its stated goal of targeting “any American company,” the group claimed to have singled out OpenAI for its support of Israel. The country has recently been widely condemned for its bombing of Palestinian civilians.
The statement cited OpenAI’s “cooperation with the occupation state of Israel and OpenAI’s CEO expressing willingness to invest more in Israel, as well as his numerous meetings with Israeli officials like Netanyahu.”
He also claimed that ChatGPT is used by Israel to “oppress Palestinians” and that “AI is now used in weapons development and by intelligence agencies like Mossad.”
Anonymous Sudan added that “ChatGPT has a general bias towards Israel and against Palestine. »
The group claimed responsibility for DDoS attacks on Swedish companies earlier this year, in what it claims was retaliation for a Koran burning near the Turkish embassy in Stockholm.
However, experts suggested The hacktivist group is actually a Russian state-backed group whose mission is to amplify anti-Western sentiment. He has also been linked to the prolific Russian “hacktivist” group Killnet.
ESET Global Cybersecurity Advisor Jake Moore argued that DDoS mitigation providers need to constantly refine their services.
“Every year, threat actors become better equipped and use more IP addresses, such as those of home IoT devices, to flood systems, making them harder to protect,” he added.
“Unfortunately, OpenAI remains one of the most talked about tech companies, making it a typical target for hackers. All that can be done to sustain your network is to continue to expect the unexpected.
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