Cyberattack targets ChatGPT, OpenAI says this is why servers were down for users around the world

OpenAI's viral generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, was down for several users across the world and people were posting on social media about how they couldn't access the tool. The outage first lasted for about 90 minutes on November 8. Then, the following day, there was yet another outage. OpenAI had earlier acknowledged both outages on its website and had said that it is working towards a fix. On Thursday, the company said that the issues had been resolved and also pointed out the reason behind the attacks- a DDoS attack.

OpenAI reveals reason behind ChatGPT outage

OpenAI, on its website, revealed that a DDoS attack had caused ChatGPT to crash for users across the world. The company also added that the incident has been taken care of and "the status of their services has returned to normal."

On Wednesday, the company revealed that reason behind the outage and wrote, "We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this."

When users were trying to log in to ChatGPT on Wednesday and Thursday, they saw a message that read, "Something went wrong. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com."

What is a DDoS attack?

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is an attempt to overwhelm a website or service with traffic from multiple sources. This can make the website or service unavailable to actual users.

For instance, think of a busy street with a lot of traffic. Now imagine that a group of people start walking onto the street from all directions, blocking the traffic. This is what a DDoS attack is like. It floods the website or service with so much traffic that users cannot access it. These cyber attacks can be caused by a variety of factors and can mean huge losses for businesses.

ChatGPT recent update

Recently, OpenAI announced new updates for ChatGPT and also unveiled GPT-4 Turbo, which is said to be the company's most powerful LLM yet. Additionally, one of these upgrades is that you will soon be able to create your own versions of ChatGPT, and earn money by letting others use them. Moreover, OpenAI also announced that ChatGPT has about 100 million weekly active users.

OpenAI is calling these custom ChatGPT chatbots GPTs. "We're rolling out custom versions of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose—called GPTs," the company wrote on its blog and added that these GPTs can be built by anyone, without the need for any coding.

"You can make them for yourself, just for your company's internal use, or for everyone. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data," the blog post added.

The post also noted that GPTs are available for ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users. However, OpenAI plans on offering GPTs to more users soon.

You can't just develop GPTs, but also share them publicly for others to use. OpenAI also announced launching a GPT store, that will have creations by verified users. Once your GPT is a part of the store, it will be searchable and available for use to other people. On the basis of how many people use your GPT, you will be able to earn money.

Talking about GPT-4 Turbo, the AI model promises to be more powerful and cheaper than its predecessors. It stores information up to April 2023 and also has a larger context window, which means that you can now enter much bigger prompts.