ChatGPT Went Offline This Week From a Cyberattack

At this point, everyone knows about ChatGPT. It’s what kicked off this year’s “AI revolution,” so to speak, and for good reason. The service makes it easy for people of all tech skill levels to understand how useful, interesting, and worrisome generative AI can be.

According to CNBC, over 92% of Fortune 500 companies use ChatGPT. That’s up from 80% in August, which is quite impressive for a service that is just under one year old. ChatGPT’s immense popularity makes it all the more concerning that the service went offline this week. At first, it wasn’t clear what caused the downtime, but we soon learned the culprit: a cyberattack.

A DDoS attack temporarily takes out ChatGPT and its services

The outages began to hit Wednesday, November 8. The attack seemed to affect various company products, including the GPT API used by over two million developers. OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, shared the news that evening: “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 company claimed no user data was compromised in the attack.

It was curious timing: Just two days before, OpenAI had a big event for AI developers, where it introduced new products, including its latest AI model, GPT-4 Turbo, as well as GPTs, user-generated versions of ChatGPT.