Is your ChatGPT down? Are you experiencing issues with ChatGPT, such as connectivity problems or encountering a ‘Network error on long responses’? – ChatGPT has been under a series of DDoS attacks, apparently orchestrated by Anonymous Sudan.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a popular AI-powered chatbot, has been experiencing outages for the past 24 hours due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The company confirmed the attacks in a statement on its status website, saying that it is working to mitigate the attacks and restore full service.
“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing to work to mitigate this.“
OpenAI on Nov 08, 2023 – 19:49 PST
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as of this week, ChatGPT now boasts 100 million weekly active users. While this places ChatGPT as the most popular platform on the internet, it also renders it a lucrative target for cybercriminals and hacktivists.
OpenAI has not yet said when it expects the ChatGPT outages to be fully resolved. However, the company has assured users that it is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
The ChatGPT outages have had a significant impact on users of the service. Many users have been unable to access ChatGPT at all, while others have experienced intermittent outages.
DDoS attacks are a type of cyberattack in which an attacker sends a large number of requests to a website or server in order to overwhelm it and make it unavailable to legitimate users. In the case of ChatGPT, the attackers are flooding the service with more requests than it can handle, causing it to go down.
Anonymous Sudan Claims Responsibility
Hackread.com can confirm that the responsibility for the attacks on OpenAI’s infrastructure has been claimed by Anonymous Sudan. The group shared various screenshots on its Telegram channel, depicting examples where OpenAI’s website and ChatGPT’s dashboard experienced downtime or displayed various errors and connectivity issues.
The group further elaborated on their motives for targeting OpenAI and ChatGPT, highlighting the reasons behind their DDoS attacks on one of the most popular platforms globally. In a Telegram post, they stated that as they are specifically targeting American companies, OpenAI, being an American company, is naturally among their prime targets.
The group additionally cited another major reason for targeting OpenAI, pointing to its association with the state of Israel, its investment plans in Israel, and the recent meeting between OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Emphasizing their support for the Palestinians, the group mentioned this as a significant rationale behind targeting OpenAI and ChatGPT.
For your information, Anonymous Sudan is a group of hacktivists who claim to be affiliated with the Anonymous collective. However, cybersecurity experts have cast doubt on these claims, suggesting that Anonymous Sudan may be a front for other Russian hacktivist groups.
Anonymous Sudan first emerged in January 2023, when they launched a series of DDoS attacks against Swedish and Danish organizations in response to the far-right activist Rasmus Paludan. In February 2023, Anonymous Sudan also DDoSed Swedish SAS Airlines.
The group has since claimed responsibility for a number of other DDoS attacks, including attacks against X (formerly Twitter), Microsoft, and other Western targets.
If you are a user of ChatGPT, there is not much you can do to prevent DDoS attacks. However, you can check the OpenAI status page for updates on the situation and to see if the service is available. You can also try accessing ChatGPT at different times of day, as the attacks may not be continuous.
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