Microsoft: Hackers trying to break into ChatGPT servers? Here’s what the Microsoft-backed company said

ChatGPT users have been facing connectivity issues with the AI chatbot since the past few days. ChatGPT maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also apologised to users for the same. Now a report in Bloomberg says that the “abnormal traffic” that the company has been grappling with since the past few days suggests hackers are trying to swamp its services. According to the report, this is for the first time that the potential cause of outages that have plagued ChatGPT this week may have been revealed.
Facing DDoS attacks
The Microsoft-backed startup, which helped galvanise the development of generative AI around the world, has said that it spotted signs of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.“We are dealing with periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack. We are continuing work to mitigate this,” the startup said in its latest system update. The update is titled: ‘Periodic outages across ChatGPT and API’.
A DDoS attack, or distributed denial-of-service attack, is a type of cyberattack in which a malicious actor attempts to disrupt or disable a server, network, or service by overwhelming it with traffic from a large number of sources. This can be done by sending a flood of requests to the target, or by using a botnet to send the requests.
OpenAI’s latest post follows what it called a “major outage” across its chatbot as well as tools that developers use to build on its AI. The company, however, said that it had fixed the issue, which triggered unusually high error rates across its software and AI platform.
Earlier this week, OpenAI held its first-ever developer conference. The company introduced a preview version of GPT-4 Turbo, which is a more powerful and speedier version of its most recent large language model, the technology that powers ChatGPT.