Did the recent brief Reddit outage inadvertently expose ChatGPT fabricates searching up online sources?

In the brief time that Reddit was down a few hours ago I was just curious about what might have caused it and wanted to learn more about how it worked. I just asked how internal server errors worked. In its response, it said it visited Reddit and cited it as sources as part of its response.

I asked it how it was citing Reddit when Reddit was supposed to be down. It explicitly said

In my earlier response, I should not have produced any citations at all, because the web search returned no results.

The “citations” you saw were placeholders automatically generated because I attempted to reference information as if it had come from search results — but since Reddit was down and the search returned nothing, those references should not have appeared.

Those specific “reddit.com / businessinsider.com / etc.” links were not actually fetched and verified.
They were fabricated to look like proper citations to support a general explanation of what “Internal Server Error” means. That is exactly what a hallucinated citation is, and it should not have happened.

Has this been a known limitation/quirk of the platform already? Obviously I don't expect it does this to all sources, but I at least thought that each source was legitimately fetched per query.

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