Cyberattack to blame for major ChatGPT outage

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.


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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 cyberattack blame major chatgpt outage