ChatGPT went down. If that stopped your team cold, that’s the real problem – The Drum
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June 10, 2025 | 4 min read
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OpenAI’s June 10 outage didn’t crash the internet. But it did reveal how deeply marketing teams have hardwired AI into their workflows and how few had a plan B.
Chatgpt takes a dive / Levart_Photographer/Unsplash
At around 3am ET on Tuesday, ChatGPT and related OpenAI services started throwing up error messages and slow responses. The company later confirmed “elevated error rates and latency” across ChatGPT, Sora and its API. Downdetector tracked a nearly 5,000% spike in user reports. Full recovery took several hours.
That’s all it took for some marketers to stall.
Across social media and Slack threads, creative teams admitted to delays. Copy drafts couldn’t be finished and brand decks couldn’t be polished. A few even joked that they might have to use their brains, heaven forbid.
But the real issue wasn’t the tool going down. It was how many teams admitted they didn’t know how to function without it.
There’s no denying the usefulness of generative AI. According to Salesforce, 51% of marketers now use it regularly, and another 22% are in the adoption pipeline. For many, it has replaced the first draft, the research legwork and sometimes the entire ideation process.
In theory, AI is an assistant. In practice, it has become the foundation. When it disappears, work grinds to a halt, not because of a lack of ideas, but because entire workflows have been built around one tool always working.
That’s not agility. That’s dependency.
The difference between AI and traditional marketing tools reveals the problem. When Photoshop crashes, designers switch to Canva. When Google goes down, researchers turn to other search engines. But when AI fails, there’s no immediate backup for the thinking it was supposed to do.
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This isn’t a warning against AI. It’s a reminder of what creativity is supposed to be: fast, nimble and resilient. When an outage hits, the response shouldn’t be panic. It should be pencils out, brains on.
What we saw this week wasn’t a breakdown of OpenAI. It was a wake-up call for anyone who has let machines become the main character in their creative process.
Tools break. Outages happen. But thinking, real, human thinking, should not.
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