Well, that escalated quickly.

In less than 24 hours, Microsoft's Tay went from a happy-go-lucky, human-loving chat bot to a full-on racist. So now, the too-impressionable Tay is getting a time out.

Microsoft has temporarily shut down the Twitter chatbot after racist trolls ruined it for everyone, teaching Tay to repeat some extremely offensive viewpoints.

Released on Wednesday, Tay was designed to interact with people to help Microsoft better understand conversational speech. Targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds, the bot turned out to be a huge hit with online miscreants, who cajoled Tay into repeating racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic slurs. Without repeating the offending tweets, we'll just say Tay went so far as to support Hitler, deny that the Holocaust happened, and even call for genocide.

Microsoft has been removing the offending tweets (although many remain online and will continue to live on in screen shots), and has put Tay to "sleep" for the time being. In a statement to PCMag, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the company has taken the chatbot offline for upgrades.

"The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement," the statement reads. "It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments."

The software giant has been getting major flak for releasing the bot without filters to prevent this type of situation. "This is the problem with content-neural algorithms," Zoe Quinn, a game developer who was embroiled with the 2014 GamerGate controversy, tweeted yesterday alongside a photo of Tay offering up a few choice words about her.