The internet felt strangely hollow.
Websites wouldn’t load. ChatGPT threw errors. Claude froze. Even X refused to open without a fight.
For a few hours, the world went unusually quiet not because humanity slowed down, but because Cloudflare slipped, and with it a huge portion of the global internet stumbled.
People described it as “annoying.”
Others said it was “crazy how fragile everything is.”
But the most honest reaction came from the thousands who didn’t even hide it:
“I feel lost without my AI.”
That’s the part that stuck with me.
Not the outage.
Not the technical details.
But the emotional reaction.
Because it tells us something uncomfortable about where the world is heading.
And if we don’t pay attention, we’re going to wake up one day with minds that look strong from the outside but are hollow from inside.
The outage wasn’t the problem. Our dependence was.
AI tools have become mental prosthetics.
We use them for everything:
thinking writing deciding planning creating reflecting
So when they disappeared today, we didn’t just lose a tool we lost a part of how we now think.
People weren’t just irritated.
They were anxious.
Scrolling frantically.
Refreshing over and over.
Feeling stuck the moment the “brain extension” went offline.
This isn’t judgment.
It’s observation.
Because I felt that pull as well.
For the first time, I saw clearly: we are not prepared for a world where our minds depend on systems we don’t control.
The future will break when the AI breaks
Yesterday was just a small taste.
A single configuration error at Cloudflare caused millions of people globally to pause their work, their conversations, their plans.
Now imagine a future where:
your documents your memories your commitments your ideas your creativity your analysis your business operations
…all depend on AI systems syncing in the background.
Imagine waking up one day and the AI that holds your “second brain,” your schedules, your thinking patterns, and your work pipeline is simply gone for a few hours.
For many people, that won’t be an inconvenience.
It’ll be a psychological shutdown.
A cognitive blackout.
The outage will expose something we haven’t admitted:
We’ve been outsourcing thinking so fast that we’ve forgotten how to sit with a problem long enough for our own mind to work.
Our minds weren’t built for constant outsourcing
There’s a beauty in slowness something I’ve been thinking about more often.
Kneading dough.
Sharpening a pencil.
Fixing a watch.
Writing by hand.
Programming without auto-complete.
Taking a walk to think instead of Googling an answer.
These things look inefficient on the surface, but they are not inefficiencies.
They are training.
They build patience.
Taste.
Judgment.
Depth.
Discernment.
Accuracy.
A sense of self.
AI strips that away the moment you lean on it too early.
And when it suddenly goes offline like it did today you get to see exactly how far the atrophy has gone.
When the machine goes silent, the mind hears itself again
And maybe that’s the strange blessing hidden inside today’s chaos.
When ChatGPT failed.
When Claude stalled.
When the entire internet slowed down…
Something else emerged:
A moment where your brain had to stand on its own two legs again.
A moment where creativity had to come from silence, not autocomplete.
Where clarity had to emerge from reflection, not prompting.
Where decisions had to be made by intuition, not delegation.
Many people hated that feeling.
Some were uncomfortable.
Others were lost.
But for a few of us, it was a reminder:
The mind you don’t use is the mind you lose.
Dependency isn’t the danger. Fragility is.
I’m not anti-AI.
Anyone who knows me knows how deeply I use it in my work, business, and thinking.
But I am against fragility.
And today made one thing clear:
A society that cannot function, think, decide, or create without AI is not a powerful society. It is a fragile one.
We need AI.
But we also need to build the inner muscles to operate when it disappears.
Whether it’s an outage, a misconfiguration, a blackout, or something far bigger.
Technology shouldn’t replace the human mind.
It should extend it.
Extensions fail.
Minds shouldn’t.
Maybe the question isn’t “What happens when AI goes down?”
Maybe the real question is:
What happens to us when we no longer know how to think without it?
That’s where the real danger sits.
Not in the code.
Not in Cloudflare.
Not in the outage.
But in the quiet dependency that grows when nobody is watching.
And every outage like this is a glimpse into the future showing us a world where the machine may always come back online, but the human mind might not.