Thursday morning your students could not reach the tool your assignment told them to use. The due date did not move.

Grok went first, at about 9:30 Eastern. ChatGPT followed around 11, and the outage took logins, file uploads, voice mode and image generation with it. Claude went down at roughly the same time. Anthropic called it an infrastructure issue and had it back by about 12:15.

Here is the part worth arguing about. The reflex is to read that as a reason to keep AI out of coursework. I think that is the wrong read, and it is the same reflex that would remove library databases from a syllabus because the library site went down during finals.

The smaller and more useful lesson is that naming one tool in one assignment is a procurement decision. You picked a vendor, committed your students to it, and gave yourself no way to see whether it will be there on the morning it is needed.

The fix is one sentence in the assignment. We are calling it the outage clause, and there is a free working session that walks you through writing yours.

Run it: https://www.harvestkernel.com/the-outage-clause/

Which one assignment on your schedule this term stops working if the tool is down?