ChatGPT crashed – and the internet freaked out

Over the past year or so, ChatGPT has become an integral part of many people’s lives. Whether for work, pleasure or entertainment, it seems the whole world uses the Large Language Model (LLM). This was only amplified by what happened earlier today: ChatGPT went down and social media went into a panic.

This event is an interesting case study in how people use the Internet as an emotional regulator for actually being on the Internet, a kind of meta-commentary on existence in the modern era.

Before we get there though, let’s take a closer look at what happened when ChatGPT went down.

Why is ChatGPT down? And how did the internet react?

ChatGPT is a chatbot created by OpenAI that is arguably the most prominent example in its field.

On January 23, the company reported on its status page that it was “currently experiencing elevated error rates in the API” and that it was investigating the issue.

At the time of writing, OpenAI has said that a “fix has been implemented” and it is monitoring the results.

While it looks like ChatGPT will be online and fully operational by the time you read this, that didn’t stop the internet from freaking out in a wide variety of ways.

For example, some people created memes about how individuals reacted when the news of the ChatGPT outage broke, specifically the habit of going to other social media to find out what’s going on:

Others referred to how much they rely on ChatGPT for employment, hinting at the difficulties they may face after the outage:

While some people found all the vitriol given to ChatGPT during its downtime deeply amusing:

Why was there such an uproar when ChatGPT went down?

It’s an interesting bit of psychology where people flow from one side of the internet (ChatGPT) to the other (social media) when the service suffered an outage.

This is for various reasons. One of the clearest is information. Going to sites like Twitter and TikTok – which are much more responsive than legacy media – means that people using ChatGPT can quickly get information about its status.

Another exciting element, however, is about control. People are notoriously adverse to changeoften find the loss of something particularly hard. When a service like ChatGPT is down – and especially if it’s a tool they use regularly in their daily lives – it can be a disorienting moment.

By taking to social media and making memes about the ChatGPT outage, people are able to exercise some form of control over the situation. Don’t just make jokes about the problem has the potential to reduce stressit also makes people feel like they are taking action, even though they may be largely helpless to influence what happens with LLM.

It’s an exciting situation: using the Internet to make yourself feel better about something that happened on the Internet, but that’s simply the nature of the modern technological era. The Internet is an integral part of so many of our lives that when it goes down, our only response is to look for an answer online.

With all this in mind, let’s just hope that ChatGPT doesn’t fail again anytime soon. I’m not sure the internet can handle it.