November 9, 2023 at 03:25AM
OpenAI is currently addressing periodic outages caused by DDoS attacks on its API and ChatGPT services. While the company has not provided specific details on the root cause, they confirmed that the incidents are related to ongoing DDoS attacks. Users experiencing issues receive error messages and OpenAI is working to mitigate the situation. Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the attacks, citing displeasure with OpenAI’s alleged bias towards Israel. Some cybersecurity researchers, however, suspect that the group may have ties to Russia. OpenAI has yet to respond to requests for comment on the outages and attacks.
Based on the meeting notes, OpenAI has been experiencing periodic outages due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on its API and ChatGPT services. OpenAI has not provided specific details about the root cause of these incidents, but they have confirmed that they are dealing with abnormal traffic patterns indicative of DDoS attacks. Users affected by these issues are seeing error messages and are unable to generate responses from ChatGPT. This comes after previous outages with ChatGPT, its API, and other services.
Anonymous Sudan, a threat actor, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks. They have attributed their actions to OpenAI’s perceived bias towards Israel and against Palestine. The group has stated that they used the SkyNet botnet for these attacks, which supports Layer 7 (L7) DDoS attacks targeting the application level of services. L7 attacks overwhelm services with a large volume of requests, straining server and network resources.
It is worth noting that there is speculation among some cybersecurity researchers that Anonymous Sudan may actually be linked to Russia, suggesting a potential false flag operation.
As of now, OpenAI has not responded to requests for comment from BleepingComputer regarding the ongoing outages and DDoS attacks.