OpenAI is grappling with “abnormal traffic” that suggests hackers are trying to swamp its services, revealing for the first time the potential cause of outages that’ve plagued ChatGPT this week.

The Microsoft Corp.-backed startup, which helped galvanize the development of generative AI around the world, said it spotted signs of a Distributed Denial of Service attack, where external perpetrators try to overload a platform by repeatedly pinging it.