Like all websites, ChatGPT is fallible — and when it went down this week, people lost their godforsaken minds.
According to OpenAI's status page, the company has experienced major issues this week, leading to breathless coverage from sites like TechRadar and The Independent — and, unsurprisingly, some massive freakouts on social media.
"F*ck I can't code without ChatGPT," someone on the r/ChatGPT subreddit raged. "Ok I can but I am too dependent on ChatGPT to do the grunt work lol."
In that same thread, one purported teacher got incredibly real about their students' over-reliance on the chatbot — and their own, too.
"I'm a professor and I have fifty students in my class," the user shared. "There was an essay due this morning and I received... nine of them! Guess that means that eighty percent of my students are too dependent on GPT to write their own essay. Kind of a fascinating natural experiment."
"On the other hand," the teacher continued, "I am really struggling to grade these nine essays on my own."
Things were a bit less deep on X, where jokes and GIFs abounded.
"ChatGPT is down