About half an hour and at the time of writing this message, ChatGPT is not working. This is not a problem limited only to some users, but a complete outage of the service, as we can see on its status page, moreover, and as many users report on social media, the problem seems to spread to the subscription modality, ChatGPT Plus , and to the recently announced ChatGPT API.

It is possible that by the time it takes to finish writing this report, the issue will be resolved, although this would not be the first time we have experienced a drop in online service hours. Unfortunately, and although we tend to forget it, the technical complexity of the infrastructures on which the services are supported is open door to possible malfunctions. And yes, it is true that in some cases their range is quite limited, but in others they can cause crashes for hours or even days.

So I want to make it clear this is not a criticism of the service failure. Today it was ChatGPT, tomorrow it could be anyone from Google, Microsoft, Meta… and in all cases, first for their own interest, but also for their users, history has taught us that these companies do not spare resources to deal with this type of incident as quickly as possible, and also to proactively work to reduce their risk (with more investment in some services than others, yes).

I think yes it is important that the ChatGPT crash is thought-provoking about the boom of artificial intelligence in these months and its rapid landing in many activities that until now did not depend on this type of services and platforms. It’s not a problem for the free OpenAI chatbot to become unavailable for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days, and in fact, the company reminds that it’s currently in preview mode, so relying on the tool for any homework is risky. Controlled but risky.

What we should think about, yes, is what could happen if these AI models start being used exclusively for functions of all kinds, from customer service to notification automation of any kind. We’ve all (or the vast majority) experienced a drop in our email service and already know the impact it can have, and now imagine the potential effects of the fall of an AI on which important functions depend.

Personally, and I’ve already made it clear in many of my posts, I think we’re living in a really exciting time when it comes to artificial intelligence that can contribute a lot and very well. However, it seems to me the best moment to remind ourselves that entrusting everything to her, no redundant systems and no plan B, can have some really notorious effects if an incident occurs. And I’m sure if we ask ChatGPT (although that’s not possible right now) for his opinion on this point, he’ll totally agree. What I did was ask Claude through Poe, who gave me a list of recommendations, from which I extract the following:

«Non-AI alternatives. If AI fails, use manual or rule-based processes. So you can go back to the simpler approach in case of errors.«