The OpenAI Battles service outage has been linked to Russian hackers.

ChatGPT was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Wednesday, which OpenAI confirmed in a status update on Thursday. According to Bloomberg, the attacks were orchestrated by Russian-backed cybercriminals calling themselves Anonymous Sudan.

“We are experiencing periodic outages due to unusual traffic conditions that reflect a DDoS attack,” the company said. “We will continue to work to mitigate this.”

The group claimed responsibility for the attack on Telegram in retaliation for OPNI's support for Israel, according to Bloomberg.

A distributed denial of service attack is an attempt to disrupt access to a targeted server, service, or network by flooding it—or the surrounding infrastructure—with Internet traffic.

The problem was reported on Tuesday at 10:52 pm EST by chatgpt and the API due to occasional reports of outages. OpenAI says the problem was fixed by midnight, but the outage has resumed.

“API and ChatGPT are down again—continuing to investigate,” said the status update, though the problem was resolved later that evening.

On Wednesday, as of 8:52 a.m. EST, the service outage resumed, lasting nearly two hours.

“Between 5:42 a.m. and 7:16 p.m. PT, we saw bugs affecting all services,” OpenAI said. “We have identified the problem and fixed it. We are now seeing normal responses from our service.

OpenAI did not respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

About a. The easiest way to think [denial of service attack] David Schud, COO at blockchain cyber security firm Holborn, told Decrypt in an interview as a hotline. “If you have a phone line with ten phones and 20 are calling you at the same time, they're going to jam the lines and you can't pick up the phones.

“This is what denial of service means: if you have 10 gigabytes of bandwidth, the devices on the other end are flooding it with more bandwidth than they can handle,” Schwed explained.

He added that because of their nature of coming from different places simultaneously, DDoS attacks are impossible to stop by IP filtering or blocking.

“From millions of affected machines and IoT devices they are opening HTTP requests, pings or any other requests to the server or router,” he said. The Network Operations Center says it will notice an error before someone arrives. Based on the end user's abnormal bandwidth consumption.

Although network operations centers have ways to divert “bad traffic,” Schwed warned that a large enough attack could bring down those machines, saying companies should simply wait until it's over.

While denial of service attacks may be new to AI chatbots, the blockchain industry has been dealing with this type of cyberattack for years. The popular Solana network was the target of a series of attacks.

In September 2021, a denial of service attack was blamed for shutting down the network for more than 17 hours. In May 2022, Solana was hit by a bot swarm called the “Candy Machine” that launched a denial of service attack on the network. In June 2022, Step-to-Income on the Solana network was hit by a distributed service attack.

After a difficult 2022, in July, the Solana Foundation told Decrypt in an email that the company has seen 100% uptime since February this year, marking a dramatic improvement in network performance.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.