ChatGPT Suffers Repeated Outages From Surge in Demand and Possible Cyberattack

OpenAI's popular AI chatbot ChatGPT suffered intermittent outages late Wednesday night. OpenAI said the outages were likely caused by a cyberattack involving abnormal traffic patterns like a DDoS attack. This comes just hours after ChatGPT recovered from a wide outage earlier in the day that OpenAI attributed to overwhelming interest in new platform features unveiled on Monday.

The latest outages affected both ChatGPT and its API services used by developers. OpenAI said it is working to mitigate the issue but problems have persisted for over six hours according to its status page. Outage tracking website Downdetector showed users still facing some problems but on a smaller scale than the earlier major outage.

The initial widescale outage on Wednesday lasted nearly two hours and displayed messages about capacity limits to users trying to access ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained that usage and demand for the new features announced Monday greatly exceeded expectations and caused the platform instability. The company is working to expand capacity to handle the surging interest and traffic. Competitor Anthropic also dealt with constraints for its Claude chatbot likely due to spillover demand from ChatGPT's downtime.