Over the last 24 hours, ChatGPT has encountered service disruptions, including a significant 90-minute outage. Users are grappling with ongoing issues, prompting a surge in social media reports detailing their inability to interact with the generative AI system.
OpenAI has confirmed that “periodic outages” affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools are attributed to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Attempts to access ChatGPT have resulted in a message informing users that “ChatGPT is at capacity right now.” Other users attempting to access ChatGPT received a message stating, “Our systems are a bit busy at the moment, please take a break and try again soon.”
OpenAI’s status checker indicates intermittent outages, potentially linked to abnormal traffic patterns resembling a DDoS attack. OpenAI has stated that efforts are underway to mitigate these disruptions, though no further updates have been provided. The company has officially acknowledged that both the ChatGPT chatbot and its API are impacted by these service interruptions.
Nevertheless, some services reliant on the chatbot, such as Bing AI, remain operational. This provide an alternative for users awaiting the restoration of ChatGPT’s normal functionality.
Microsoft Azure is the exclusive cloud provider for all OpenAI workloads across research, API and products. This DDOS attack comes just a week after Microsoft announced the Secure Future Initiative (SFI). This is a cyber security initiative to use automation and AI during software development. It is meant to improve the security of Microsoft cloud services.
ChatGPT 100 Million Weekly Users
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a significant announcement at the company’s inaugural developer conference in San Francisco. He announced that ChatGPT now boasts an impressive 100 million weekly active users. This milestone is even more remarkable considering that the service was launched only a year ago. It quickly reached an estimated 100 million monthly users within just two months. A record for the fastest-growing user base.
Altman also disclosed that the platform has become a go-to platform for over two million developers. Notably, more than 92% of developers from Fortune 500 companies use the platform.
These noteworthy achievements were unveiled in conjunction with a series of new announcements by OpenAI. Among them is the introduction of GPT-4 Turbo, a “more potent” and cost-effective iteration of their flagship text-generation AI model, GPT-4. The AI company is also launching a no-code platform where users can tailor their own ChatGPT for specific use cases.
