The logo of ChatGPT, a language model-based chatbot developed by OpenAI (Photo by SEBASTIEN … [+] BOZON/AFP via Getty Images)
AFP via Getty Images
Over the past year or so, ChatGPT has become integral to many people’s lives. Whether it’s for work, pleasure, or entertainment, it seems as though the entire world is using the large language model (LLM). This was only reinforced by what happened earlier today: ChatGPT went down and social media erupted into 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 sort of meta commentary on existence in the modern era.
Before we arrive there, though, let’s have 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’s arguably the most prominent example in its field.
On Jan. 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 problem.
OpenAI said that a “fix has been implemented” and it’s monitoring the results, but it appears that, at the time of writing, ChatGPT is still suffering issues and the company is “continuing to work on a fix.”
Although ChatGPT may be online and fully operational by the time you read this, during the period in question, the internet freaked out in a wide variety of ways.
Some people, for example, created memes about how individuals reacted when the news of the ChatGPT outage broke, specifically the habit of heading to other social media sites to find out what’s going on:
Others made reference to how much they rely on ChatGPT for employment, implying the difficulties they might face following 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, with people flooding from one side of the internet (ChatGPT) to the other (social media) when the service suffered an outage.
This is for a variety of reasons. One of the clearest is information. Heading to sites like Twitter and TikTok—which react far quicker than legacy media—means that people who use ChatGPT can get information about its status quickly.
Another intriguing element though is about control. People are notoriously adverse to change, often finding the loss of something in particular tough. When a service like ChatGPT is down—and especially if it’s a tool they use regularly in their day-to-day life—it can be a disorientating moment.
By heading to social media and making memes about the ChatGPT outage, people are able to exert some sort of control over the situation. Not only does making jokes about the issue have the potential to reduce stress, it also makes people feel like they’re taking action, even though they might be broadly helpless to impact what’s happening with the LLM.
It’s an intriguing state of affairs: using the internet to make yourself feel better about something that happened on the internet, but this is simply the nature of the modern technological era. The internet is integral to 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 have an outage again any time soon. I’m not sure the internet could handle that.
