CSPaper: review sidekick

May 14, 2025 – Overleaf, the beloved online LaTeX editor, gave researchers a scare by going down on the eve of the NeurIPS 2025 deadline. Many users reported 502 server errors and sluggish loading at the worst possible time – just hours before the Anywhere on Earth cutoff for submissions. Despite the frantic late-night editing by thousands of authors, Overleaf’s official status showed “no incidents” by the time this article is put online. The timing was no coincidence; with the NeurIPS 2025 full paper deadline on May 15 AoE, Overleaf’s servers likely buckled under a surge of last-minute activity. (If you refreshed Overleaf in panic only to see an error, you were most definitely not alone – outage trackers noted hundreds of users affected during the peak rush.) [image: image.png.e3b70e14e91cf1d7e01a8c6632b21f10.png] Déjà Vu at AI Conference Deadlines Regular users joked that “Overleaf down before a deadline” is practically an academic tradition. Indeed, this isn’t the first time Overleaf has faltered during a major AI conference crunch. Last year, as the NeurIPS 2024 deadline approached, one observer quipped on Hacker News: “Overleaf down. If you have a paper deadline then my condolences.” Such tongue-in-cheek sympathy reflects a common experience – each season of deadlines, someone, somewhere is posting the same lament. Overleaf even suffered a notable outage in Dec 2024, unrelated to a deadline, with its team publicly acknowledging the downtime. By now, many researchers half-expect a bit of chaos whenever big submission dates roll around. It’s not just Overleaf. OpenReview – the platform hosting paper submissions and reviews for conferences like NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML – has also strained under deadline pressure. With thousands of authors trying to upload PDFs at once, slowdowns are routine and occasional outages have forced organizers to improvise. In some cases, deadlines even got extended by 48 hours due to technical outages (much to the relief of procrastinators everywhere!). Conference organizers constantly urge authors not to wait until the last minute, but the last-minute rush has a gravity of its own. When submission portals crawl and Overleaf won’t load, it truly feels like a rite of passage in AI research . The Incredible Submission Surge Why does this keep happening? Simply put, AI conference submissions have exploded in recent years, putting tremendous load on tools and sites during deadlines. For context, NeurIPS 2023 saw an “astonishing” 12,345 submissions, and that number jumped to 15,671 submissions in 2024 – all vying for a spot at the premier AI conference. Other conferences aren’t far behind: ICLR 2024 received 7,262 papers and ICML 2024 nearly 9,500. These massive waves of papers translate to tens of thousands of researchers scrambling to polish manuscripts, compile LaTeX, and upload files in the final 24 hours before the deadline. Overleaf, being the go-to collaborative editor, experiences sky-high traffic at these moments – multiple people per paper rapidly editing and recompiling documents. It’s a perfect (brain)storm: heavy server load, anxious users, and a hard countdown timer. No wonder the system occasionally cries uncle! The strain on OpenReview (and other submission sites) is equally intense. NeurIPS and ICLR now require authors to have OpenReview profiles, and the submission system must ingest thousands of PDF uploads around the deadline hour. In peak times, OpenReview has been known to respond sluggishly or intermittently fail as everyone tries to hit “Submit” simultaneously. It’s practically an arms race: as machine learning grows, so do the submission counts – and both Overleaf and OpenReview are racing to scale up fast enough. Community Reactions: Frustration & Humor When Overleaf went down this time, the research community’s reactions ranged from despair to dark humor. On Reddit, users vented their anxiety: “The deadline... is within 48 hours, and I don’t have a local backup!” one panicked, watching the editor fail to load. Others chimed in about seeing “Bad Gateway” errors and worried about losing precious work. (Pro tip: many vowed never to trust cloud editing alone again – Overleaf does offer Git integration for local backups, which suddenly seemed like a lifesaver!). The sight of academics collectively screaming “WHY NOW, OVERLEAF?! ” has practically become a meme of its own. Meanwhile, Twitter and other socials lit up with the hashtag #OverleafDown, as both complaints and jokes poured in. Some exhausted authors were genuinely upset, while others tried to lighten the mood. In one academic meme forum, a top-voted post urged frazzled grad students to “go touch some grass, Overleaf is down” – a humorous reminder to take a break (since there was nothing else to do until the site came back). On Mastodon, a researcher wryly declared, “Looks like Overleaf is down. It’s a conspiracy to stop me from working on this manuscript!” These tongue-in-cheek responses show how communal the experience has become: everyone recognizes the mix of panic and comedy that accompanies a deadline outage. Misery loves company, and in these moments the AI research community certainly comes together – if only to share a collective facepalm. The (Deadline) Show Must Go On Thankfully, the Overleaf outage on May 14 was resolved in time, and authors could resume editing and submit their papers (likely with a big sigh of relief). By the submission deadline, all was back online, and NeurIPS 2025 papers were safely in. Still, this episode highlights the annual drama that unfolds behind groundbreaking AI papers: not only are researchers pushing the frontiers of science, they’re also pushing the limits of online services! In the end, the submission rush has become an integral part of conference culture – equal parts stressful and oddly camaraderie-building. Overleaf and OpenReview outages are the modern-day “battle scars” of academia, stories to be recounted over coffee after the deadline. As AI conferences continue to grow, perhaps these platforms will scale up too (one can hope!). Until then, remember to keep calm, back up your files, and maybe keep an offline LaTeX install handy. And if all else fails, there’s always that sage advice: take a deep breath, step outside for a moment – the paper chase will still be here when you return.