ChatGPT is down, may be under DDoS attack

The first outage began around 9 a.m. on November 9, and about an hour later, OpenAI posted on its status page that it had fixed the problem, CNBC reported.

However, the status page later confirmed multiple outages, affecting ChatGPT and its API (application program interface). The status page said OpenAI's API and ChatGPT services were experiencing "slow responses."

The final message on the OpenAI site, posted last night, reads: “We are dealing with a periodic outage due to an unusual traffic pattern reflecting a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack.”

OpenAI said it is continuing to work to mitigate the situation. CNBC also reported that another AI chatbot, Claude 2 from Anthropic, also stopped working yesterday. It is unclear whether the two events are related. The DDoS attack may have occurred shortly after OpenAI held its first developer conference on September 8.

In another development, the company announced a new AI product, GPTs. This chatbot allows developers and companies to customize their own version of ChatGPT to serve specific needs and services.

The company also announced a preview of its GPT-4 Turbo prototype, which will have a contextual window that allows it to accept a 300-page text prompt and operate faster than the current GPT-4 chatbot, while reducing operating costs by up to two times.