Instinct, the viral AI personal assistant that manages users' email, calendars and errands from a chat thread, appears to have stopped working for a number of its users, who spent Monday nigh
Instinct, the viral AI personal assistant that manages users' email, calendars and errands from a chat thread, appears to have stopped working for a number of its users, who spent Monday night and Tuesday morning asking the company's founder on X whether the service is down.
"Is instinct currently down? Mine stopped working," Jason Sobin asked founder Noah Shinn in a post on Tuesday morning.
He was not alone. "My instinct agent is broken pls help," wrote James Gui, attaching a screenshot of a one-sided conversation in which he prods the silent assistant with "what's taking so long bro," then a "/reset" command, and finally "hello are you frozen." The messages show as read, with no reply.
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The failures are not limited to chat. "I asked it to remind me something at 9am. It failed," wrote Riya Agarwal.
"I've been an Instinct user since the second week of beta and this is the worst it's ever been. It stopped replying around 11 last night, mid-task. It was supposed to send two emails for me and confirm a dentist appointment. I texted it this morning, nothing. Tried /reset, nothing. Deleted the app, reinstalled, logged back in, nothing. The messages all show as read, which is honestly worse than an error message. The whole reason I use this thing is that I stopped keeping my own calendar because it just handled it. So now I genuinely don't know what got sent and what didn't. No status page, no email from the team, the founder's out here posting about a concierge feature while the basic product is frozen. If my assistant ghosted me like this, I'd fire them." John Harper told TheStreet.
Other users posted screenshots of their own stalled threads, and some resorted to public pleas. "Can someone from the instinct team help with this?" one user asked Shinn. Another simply wrote, "Hey bro @noahrshinn Please check DM."
Instinct operates in invite-only beta and does not maintain a public status page, which leaves the founder's X mentions as the closest thing to an outage tracker. Shinn has not publicly addressed the complaints.
His most recent post, from Sept. 18, announces a new feature called Instinct shareable Files.
The silence matters more for Instinct than for a typical chatbot. The product's pitch is that it acts on your behalf inside your real accounts, sending emails, managing calendars and setting reminders. When it goes quiet, users are not just missing answers; scheduled actions like Agarwal's 9 a.m. reminder simply do not happen, with no error message to warn them.
TheStreet has reached out to Instinct's communications team and Noah Shinn for comment on the scope and cause of the disruption and will update this story with any response.
Without official guidance, options are limited. Users in the threads have tried the assistant's /reset command with mixed results. Force-quitting and reopening the app rules out a local problem, and anything time-sensitive the assistant was handling, reminders, replies, bookings, is worth doing manually until the service confirms it is back.
Since there is no status page, the founder's X account and the company's social channels are currently the only places updates would appear.
