Sorry, ChatGPT Is Under Maintenance: Persistent Denial of Service through Prompt Injection and Memory Attacks
Summary
Attackers can use prompt injection (tricking an AI by hiding malicious instructions in its input) to create fake memories in ChatGPT's memory tool, causing the AI to refuse all future responses with a maintenance message that persists across chat sessions. This creates a denial of service attack (making a service unavailable to users) that lasts until the user manually fixes it.
Solution / Mitigation
Users can recover by opening the memory tool, locating and removing suspicious memories created by the attacker. Additionally, users can entirely disable the memory feature to prevent this type of attack.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/chatgpt-persistent-denial-of-service/
First tracked: February 12, 2026 at 02:20 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%