Published Date : 11/06/2025
On June 10, around 3 a.m. ET, ChatGPT and related OpenAI services started experiencing significant issues. Users encountered error messages and slow responses, causing a near 5,000% spike in user reports on Downdetector. The company confirmed “elevated error rates and latency” across ChatGPT, Sora, and its API. 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, heaven forbid, use their brains.
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.
AI isn’t the enemy. But neither is the blank page. 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.
This isn’t a warning against AI. It’s a reminder of what creativity is supposed to be. Fast. Nimble. 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.
Q: What happened during the ChatGPT outage on June 10?
A: On June 10, around 3 a.m. ET, ChatGPT and related OpenAI services started experiencing error messages and slow responses, causing a significant spike in user reports and leading to a full recovery that took several hours.
Q: How did the outage affect marketing teams?
A: The outage caused delays in marketing workflows, with creative teams admitting to delays in finishing copy drafts and polishing brand decks, highlighting their dependency on AI tools.
Q: What is the main concern regarding AI in marketing?
A: The main concern is the dependency on AI tools, which can lead to work grinding to a halt when these tools fail, rather than fostering creativity and resilience in marketing teams.
Q: How should marketing teams approach AI tools?
A: Marketing teams should treat AI as an assistant rather than a foundation, maintaining the ability to function and be creative without relying solely on AI tools.
Q: What is the importance of human creativity in marketing?
A: Human creativity is crucial in marketing as it ensures agility, resilience, and the ability to adapt when tools fail, maintaining the integrity and effectiveness of marketing strategies.