ChatGPT and Claude Go Down Same Afternoon, Nation Forced to Remember Its Own Opinions
For 94 minutes, Americans were reportedly on their own with regard to what they think about things.
WASHINGTON — A simultaneous outage of ChatGPT and Claude on Monday afternoon left an estimated 210 million Americans briefly responsible for forming their own views, a situation federal officials described as "unprecedented" and "nobody's fault, hopefully."
The outage began at 1:12 p.m. Eastern and lasted 94 minutes, during which time users attempting to ask whether a text message sounded passive-aggressive, what to name a dog, or how they felt about a coworker's promotion received only a spinning icon and, eventually, silence.
"I sat there looking at my own email draft for eleven minutes," said Trevor Hallam, 34, a project manager in Denver. "I had to decide if it was too long. I had no way of knowing. I sent it. I have no idea if it was fine. I still don't."
Emergency rooms reported a small uptick in visits from people who had been asked their opinion at lunch and "just kind of froze." A Slack survey of 4,000 workers found that 61 percent spent the outage window "waiting," 28 percent tried Gemini "as a bit," and 11 percent wrote a paragraph unassisted and described the experience as "like walking on a leg that fell asleep."
Both companies restored service by 2:46 p.m. and blamed the incidents on unrelated infrastructure failures that they discovered were related.
Officials say the episode exposed a serious gap in national resilience. "We have strategic reserves of oil and grain," said one senior adviser. "We have no strategic reserve of takes. If this had lasted a full day, people would have started asking each other what they thought, in person, and we do not have a playbook for that."
At press time, both services were back online, and the nation had returned to asking whether its opinions were good.