The Day That ChatGPT Died: Lessons For The Rest Of Us – Above the Law
We need to think before we become overly reliant on any technology but particularly GenAI.
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“Cause the players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?” — Don McLean, American Pie
That musical metaphor was painfully apt on November 18, when my own digital world temporarily went silent.
On that day, I, like a lot of people, experienced the outage of several LLM tools like ChatGPT and Claude. At first, I didn’t think all that much about it. But there are some real lessons here about technology and reliance on it we should all heed.
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The Day It Died (Temporarily)
November 18 started like any other day. I was up early to finish some articles to meet a deadline. I was in the middle of doing so and needed some information to finish them. I figured that information would be easy and quick to get from ChatGPT so I had procrastinated doing the work.
Just what I needed: when I opened ChatGPT on my laptop, I got some strange message about my credentials being invalid.
My immediate reaction was yikes! I checked my phone and was able to open ChatGPT on it. I explained the problem to ChatGPT hoping for some solution. We went through about 45 minutes of instructions on how to change various security settings on my laptop, none of which worked, of course. What wasn’t suggested was that there was an outage and hang tight for a bit.
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Of course, we all later found out the outage was caused by a failure of something called Cloudflare. What Cloudflare does is protect its customers which are many, not just ChatGPT, from malicious security attacks like credential stuffing, cross-site scripting, SQL injection, bot attacks, and API abuse. When it failed, it blocked access temporarily to many of its customers like ChatGPt and Claude sites.
The outage was corrected and most of us went about our business.
But for the deadline-driven and exacting business lawyers and legal professionals are in, it’s right to hit pause and understand what actually happened.
And in doing so, there are a couple of lessons not just for ChatGPT and Cloudflare but for the rest of us as well. Lessons about cybersecurity and reliance on technology.
So What Happened?
One of the most astute observers of the cybersecurity scene is the journalist and investigative reporter Brian Krebs. He writes a blog called Krebs on Security. It’s a blog worth reading on a regular basis since it brings the myriads of security risks we all otherwise unknowingly face every day. He talks regularly about security incidents, cyber-attacks, vulnerabilities, and related threats.
In his post on November 19, Krebs talked about the outage. The post was entitled The Cloudflare Outage May be a Security Roadmap. The title itself suggests why we need to be a little cautious.
Krebs provides a timeline for the incident which Cloudflare described as “an internal service degradation.” Cloudflare and Krebs were quick to point out that the outage was not due to a cyberattack or any sort of malicious activity. But that doesn’t mean the incident didn’t have some significant security wrinkles.
The Outage Impact
So you say, so what? The system failed but people couldn’t access the LLMs anyway. Not so fast, according to Krebs. Like me with my cell phone, lots of people were still able to access tools like ChatGPT with workarounds, particularly those with some knowledge about how to do it (which was not me, I just got lucky).
Since Cloudflare protects not just ChatGPT but a whole host of entities, that means there were a lot of folks exposed during the limited time of the outage. And many of these entities themselves pivoted away from Cloudflare during the outage so their sites remained accessible to customers and others. This created a window of opportunity for bad guys that were previously kept at bay by Cloudflare.
The bottom line, if the Cloudflare customers relied only on the Cloudflare protections and didn’t have adequate back-up protections, they and their customers were exposed, and they need to check to see if they were attacked during that time period.
So….
Two lessons for the rest of us. First, when it comes to cybersecurity, you need to have double or even triple protections. The problem with technology is that it can fail and fail quickly and in unpredictable ways. I can’t tell you how many times I have stood up to give a presentation only to have the technology I was going to rely on fail. I learned a long time ago as a trial lawyer that when you are going to present evidence to a judge or jury, you need to have several contingency plans. The same is true here. Remember the concept of a belt AND a pair of suspenders. When it comes to cybersecurity, maybe it’s belts and pairs of suspenders.
Second lesson. We need to think before we become overly reliant on any technology but particularly GenAI. Why particularly GenAI? It’s getting significant publicity and traction anywhere and everywhere these days. The revolutionary potential of it has us all salivating as we picture a changed world.
That may be so. But it’s still technology that can fail — fail unpredictably and spectacularly. The Cloudflare outage didn’t impact me all that much other than some inconvenience. I got the research I needed in old-fashioned ways. It just took longer.
But if I were sweating a filing deadline and had no back-up plan, the result could have been catastrophic. As previously written, let’s pause and get a reality grip here. To take vendor promises with a grain of salt. For a whole host of reasons Melissa Rogozinski and I discussed in a several recent Above the Law articles, the promises don’t always match reality.
As discussed before, the margin for error in law is exceedingly small. And the impact of error is exceedingly large. That means we can’t be complacent about technology, especially one seeming capable of doing so many things that were previously done either by people or various technologies. That meant failure of either a human or one piece of technology would not be quite as impactful as the potential failure of an LLM that does so many things.
We need to all remember that as we rush to wholesale adopt GenAI in our work and everyday life.
Let’s Not Forget the Day the Music Died
Don’t overrely on GenAI or any tech for that matter. Have back-up and contingency plans. Don’t fall for the idea that any tech, just like any human, can’t fail from time to time.
That’s the nature of tech. It doesn’t mean we don’t take advantage of it, it means we do so with eyes open.
Let’s not forget the day our tech music died. Keep playing American Pie in your head. And yes, if the song is in your head today, you can blame me.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
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