ChatGPT Hit by Hackers

A hacker group with reported ties to Russia is claiming responsibility for a service interruption of ChatGPT this week.

Anonymous Sudan, a hacker group, has taken credit for the attack on its Telegram channel, according to Bloomberg. The group said it targeted OpenAI for allegedly cooperating with Israel by willing to invest in the country, for being "biased" against Palestine and for being an American company.

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on its status page yesterday that the chatbot had periodic service outages due to an "abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.” In this type of attack, a hacker floods a server with traffic to prevent users from accessing the site.

The incident was first spotted on the morning of Nov. 7. Some 24 hours later, the issue is still ongoing with OpenAI saying it is “continuing work to mitigate this." The issue was finally resolved on the evening of Nov. 8.

The hack comes a day after OpenAI held its first DevDay event where it unveiled a slew of new features, including GPT-4 Turbo, custom ChatGPT and API updates.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said via X (Twitter) that user interest is "far outpacing our expectations" and there will be service instability in the short term “due to load.”

Related:OpenAI DevDay: GPT-4 Turbo, Custom ChatGPT and API Updates

“We were planning to go live with GPTs for all subscribers Monday but still haven’t been able to. we are hoping to soon.”