At 08:34 in the morning, Chilean time, on June 10, 2025, the workflow of millions of people suddenly froze. One of the most widely used artificial intelligence platforms in the world, ChatGPT, stopped responding. Initially, there were slow responses, then 500 errors, and in less than ten minutes, the crash was total. ChatGPT was offline worldwide.
What started as a simple anomaly soon turned into a global trend. Users from all over the world were reporting the same experience: neither GPT-4o, nor voice mode, nor Copilot, nor personalized assistants were responding. It was as if the digital oxygen had been cut off for those who work, create, or study with AI as their usual copilot. What happened? What were the consequences of this technological blackout? Here we analyze it.
A summary of the blackout: global collapse at OpenAI
The website DownDetector received over 100,000 reports in less than an hour. It affected users from the United States, Europe, Latin America, India, and Australia equally. Not only ChatGPT went down: also Microsoft Copilot (which uses OpenAI’s backend), the voice mode of GPT-4o, and mobile applications.
In OpenAI’s official dashboard, the issue was quickly confirmed: at 08:35, a “widespread availability issue in ChatGPT” was identified, which over the following minutes extended to more services. The cause, initially, was not disclosed. The company only indicated that their team “was investigating the issue”.
The interruption lasted for more than four hours, although the service was partially restored in some countries before the global recovery was completed. Uncertainty prevailed during the blackout, which coincided with the busiest working hours in the western hemisphere.
Immediate global impact: productive chaos and digital silence
For millions of people who rely on ChatGPT and Copilot in their daily work —from programmers to journalists, designers, marketers or students—, the outage was a brutal reminder of our technological dependence. Tools that assist in answering emails, correcting code, drafting reports, or even structuring classes stopped working without warning.
The domino effect was immediate. Development teams were left paralyzed without GitHub Copilot. Support and customer service departments using custom GPT assistants were unable to operate normally. In many digital media outlets, editors using GPT to create headlines or enrich content saw their workflow completely interrupted.
For some, it was a nuisance. For others, a real loss of productivity, especially in sectors where AI is already integrated as part of core processes. It was not just a software crash: it was a crack in the layer that supports part of our digital economy.
Social media reactions: humor, memes, and collective venting
Twitter/X, Reddit, Threads, and TikTok exploded with posts ranging from panic to humor. “Did anyone else feel existential emptiness when ChatGPT went down?” asked one user. Another joked: “Today I had to think for myself. 0/10, do not recommend.”
Within minutes, memes comparing ChatGPT’s crash to the Apocalypse started appearing, with scenes from “The Office” or “Interstellar” as the backdrop. An image of the blue “Regenerate response” button crying inconsolably went viral, along with another image of Homer Simpson writing by hand with the caption: “This is how they worked in 2022.”
There were also more thoughtful publications, questioning the enormous trust that humanity has placed in a single company. “It’s as if the Internet had a single brain... and went on vacation without telling us,” tweeted an analyst.
Impact on work, education, and research
The disruption affected not only businesses or freelancers, but also teachers, students, and researchers. Many educators use GPT to create guides, exercises, and interactive classes. Students of all levels, from schoolchildren to university students, depend on the chatbot to study or do assignments.
Academic institutions were also affected: several laboratories that use GPT-4 as an interface for data analysis, automatic paper translation, or bibliographic exploration were rendered inoperative. Researchers shared screenshots of their empty chats, frustrated at not being able to retrieve responses or continue experiments.
In remote education, which is still relevant in many countries, the outage left without key support tools. This raises a fundamental question: how to adapt when the most versatile facilitator of modern learning goes out without warning?
Technical issues and the (temporary) silence of OpenAI
OpenAI did not provide detailed technical explanations during the first few hours. Only at 13:00 UTC (10:00 in Chile), the company updated its status page indicating that they had “identified the underlying issue” and were working on a phased solution.
Experts speculated about possible causes: traffic overload (GPT-4 has increased demand), errors in the distributed infrastructure, routing failures, or even problems with providers like Microsoft Azure. Some voices mentioned the possibility of a bug introduced in a silent update of the backend.
As of the closing of this edition, no official post-mortem has been revealed. This has generated criticism: for a tool that millions depend on, more transparency is expected. The secrecy of OpenAI contrasts with the policy of other tech companies that publish detailed reports after similar failures.
Alternatives during the blackout: who filled the void?
During the fall, users migrated to other platforms. Claude 3 (Anthropic) and Gemini (Google) reported significant increases in traffic. Perplexity AI also positioned itself as a quick option for those who needed to continue with urgent tasks.
In networks, some recommended turning to open-source models like Mistral or LLaMA 3, although their installation is not as accessible for average users. It became clear that despite the hegemony of OpenAI, there are alternatives... but few offer the same level of integration, usability, and fine-tuned results.
Many companies also realized the risks of depending on a single API for their entire productivity chain. The event triggered internal discussions about multicloud strategies, redundancy, and model backups. A bitter but necessary alert.
And now what? Recovery, promises, and next steps
Around noon, services began to be restored. First, web access returned, then mobile apps, and later on, voice functionalities and personalized GPTs. OpenAI updated its dashboard confirming the resolution of the incident.
However, the experience left a mark. Many wonder what measures the company will take to prevent a repetition. A technical report is expected in the coming hours and possible improvements in resilience infrastructure. It is also being discussed whether they will offer compensation to ChatGPT Plus and Teams enterprise customers.
Sam Altman has not yet spoken on the matter, which is surprising given his usual presence on social media. It is likely that once the systems are stabilized, OpenAI will activate its reputational containment plan with a mix of technical transparency and promises of future reliability.
Reflection: the invisible dependency and the power of a single AI
What happened on June 11, 2025 was more than a blackout: it was a mirror of our relationship with artificial intelligence. We suddenly discovered how much we have delegated to a tool that we take for granted. And also how centralized that trust is: one single company, one single infrastructure.
Is it healthy to rely so much on a single AI? What will happen when these tools are even more integrated, in health, finance, security, or transportation? The fall of ChatGPT offers us an early lesson: diversify, understand the limits of technology, and not lose the human ability to adapt.
In the midst of chaos, there was something positive: for a few hours, thousands of people rediscovered that they could work, think, and create without AI. And although many breathed a sigh of relief when ChatGPT returned, something changed. Perhaps next time we will be better prepared.
When the copilot fails, the pilot takes control
The collapse of ChatGPT was not just a technical failure: it was a sociotechnological phenomenon that put on hold an invisible global machinery. It reminded us that artificial intelligence, no matter how powerful it is, is not infallible. And that if we are going to build the future on it, we must do so with balance, redundancy, and responsibility.
The next few hours will bring more details, technical analysis, and perhaps new strategies from OpenAI. But the conversation has already begun: how do we coexist with an AI that is both powerful and vulnerable? The answer will define much of the digital future.