A compilation of hilarious memes about ChatGPT's global outage from yesterday

OpenAI has had quite a busy schedule with its "OpenAI's 12 days of shipmas." Over the past week, the ChatGPT maker has made multiple releases, big and small, including the launch of a new $200 ChatGPT subscription tier dubbed ChatGPT Pro with unlimited access to OpenAI o1, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice mode. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model also shipped to broad availability.

Recently, Apple launched a new version of its Apple Intelligence tech baked with ChatGPT as part of the iOS 18.2 update with many AI-powered features, including Image Playground, Genmoji, and more. However, OpenAI was seemingly affected by technical difficulties, preventing its broad user base from accessing ChatGPT and its capabilities globally. The issue also affected other OpenAI services, including its API and Sora.

The AI firm acknowledged the outage, indicating it had identified the issue and was working on a fix. A few hours later, the company issued a statement indicating that the affected services had been restored.

For context, OpenAI's text-to-video AI model, Sora recently shipped to broad availability after being in preview since February. The model can generate one-minute-long videos while maintaining high quality and adherence to the user’s prompt. However, the ChatGPT maker admitted that it ships with critical performance issues, including challenges in simulating the physics of a complex scene and understanding specific instances of cause.

ChatGPT's global outage caused chaos, outrage, and a bit of laughter

ChatGPT is arguably the most popular AI tool. Its broad adoption and popularity globally can be attributed to OpenAI's early investment in AI technology compared to its rivals, including Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic.

According to a report by Appfigures, ChatGPT reigns over Microsoft Copilot mobile. Microsoft launched Copilot's mobile apps on Android and iOS late last year, with free access to OpenAI's GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 image generation technology. However, it failed to dent ChatGPT's revenue and downloads. Market analysts and experts attributed Microsoft Copilot's slow adoption to poor promotion practices and a subtle launch.

Based on the millions of posts shared about ChatGPT's recent outage on social media, many users depend on its advanced capabilities for several use cases. While OpenAI has restored the affected services, including ChatGPT, the memes shared about the incident were downright hilarious.

An interesting observation by @time0149 on X suggested that the integration of ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence might have caused the massive outage:

"Maybe adding 25 Million iPhones today was more than the stress test simulation.

Assumption 40% of the iPhones eligible performed the iOS upgrade which links to ChatGPT.

Total for Apple Intelligence capable iPhones in the US: An estimated 62.5 to 67.5 million units. This range accounts for both the iPhone 15 Pro models and the newly released iPhone 16 models, assuming they continue to sell at a similar rate in the US market as previous years."

Here are some hilarious memes I found on social media during the outage.

I cover a lot of AI content daily. During my investigation and research on the topic, one thing almost always stands out for me. There's always a conversation on social media, Reddit or X (formerly Twitter), about how a student was unfairly punished for reportedly using AI tools to handle assignments. Course facilitators echo similar sentiments, indicating most of the work submitted by students is AI-generated.

Interestingly, as AI becomes more advanced, it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell what's real and what's fake. Co-founder and former X (Twitter) CEO Jack Patrick Dorsey echoed similar sentiments:

"Don't trust; verify. You have to experience it yourself. And you have to learn yourself. This is going to be so critical as we enter this time in the next five years or 10 years because of the way that images are created, deep fakes, and videos; you will not, you will literally not know what is real and what is fake."

I thought coding was dead in the water with the prevalence of AI

Users have expressed concerns over AI claiming their jobs. Banking, coding, and structural design jobs are reportedly among the first professions on AI's chopping block.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang shared interesting insights about the future of coding as a plausible career for the next generation. The executive indicated the profession might be dead in the water, advising the youth to explore alternative career options in biology, education, manufacturing, or farming. Even Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman shared the same sentiments:

"If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding."

Billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicts a job-free future with the progression of AI. He claims that the technology could turn jobs into a hobby for most people. While the billionaire admits the world is on the verge of the biggest technological breakthrough with AI, he has raised critical concerns, including insufficient electricity to power AI advances beyond 2025. For context, Google and Microsoft's electricity consumption surpasses the power usage of over 100 countries.

A little competition...

In more than one occurrence, we've seen competitors capitalize on their rival's service interruptions to publicize their services or products as the superior and most preferred alternative. ChatGPT's recent outage wasn't a unique case. Elon Musk has in more than one instance lauded X's Grok model as "the most powerful AI system in the world."

He seemingly used the oldest trick in the book to promote X's Grok during ChatGPT's global outage, leaving millions of users stranded by commenting "@Grok 😉" on OpenAI's post confirming the restoration of services.