On Tuesday morning, when the mighty digital highways powered by Cloudflare decided to take an unscheduled siesta, the world rediscovered the dusty relic known as Google Search and people had to actually do their own work without the help of ChatGPT.
According to Just the News [1], web infrastructure company Cloudflare had an internal outage. That resulted in about three hours of downtime for X, ChatGPT and lots of other websites that sent error messages to humans everywhere who were hoping to take a nap themselves instead of doing the work they were paid to do.
Corporate offices everywhere held mandatory “remember-your-job” meetings so that people could figure out how to do their jobs without AI. Apparently relying on ChatGPT to draft your 10-page memo at the last minute is NOT a good idea – because when the internet implodes, your keyboard remains silent. And so might your paycheck!
And then there were the poor Democrats, forced to sit on their hands until X sputtered back to life so they could resume railing about Trump and the Epstein files.
And for the pièce de résistance: when AI is down, you can’t ask AI why AI is down.
By the time Cloudflare finally lurched back to life, America had already endured its three-hour tech apocalypse and a forced return to analog thinking. No AI shortcuts, no instant answers, no digital babysitter. Just humans, their keyboards, and the terrifying realization that sometimes you actually have to use your own brain. And honestly? We might all need that reminder a little more often.