ChatGPT was down for hours and people used the opportunity to turn it into a meme.
Image: Pexels
In a turn of events that plummeted productivity and gave many existential dread, ChatGPT was down for more than 10 hours earlier this week, a move that left users feeling as though they were teleported back to the Dark Ages (or at least to 2018).
The worldwide outage began around 2:45 a.m. ET (9:45 a.m. SAST) on Tuesday, according to Down Detector.
After a brief dip in complaints, reports spiked again as the sun rose across the U.K., Europe, North America, and Australia. A truly global “what do I even do without my AI?” moment.
ChatGPT’s free and paid tiers were both down, and to those who love image generation, Sora, OpenAI’s dreamy image generator, had downtime.
So what caused the ChatGPT outage? OpenAI confirmed it was aware of the issue but gave no official reason. However, there are a few usual suspects for outages like these.
The most common cause of these AI outages is server overload. Additionally, the outage may have been triggered by software updates or new feature releases, which can introduce bugs or cause temporary instability. Another possibility is rate limiting, a practice implemented to reduce strain on systems. While some features may still be accessible, others could be temporarily paused.
With no AI to turn to, people took to social media to voice their frustration. X (formerly Twitter) was flooded with reactions ranging from mild inconvenience to full-blown identity crises. Here are some of our favourite crash outs:
The real question on everyone's mind: Is this how Skynet starts?
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