WASHINGTON—The nation’s group chats entered a fourth consecutive day of silence Thursday, following a message that read, in its entirety, “Where does everyone want to eat?”

In one representative thread, titled “Brunch Crew 🥂 (NEW) (REAL)”, all 41 members opened the message within seconds of its arrival, according to read receipts reviewed by Taradiddle.news. No one has typed anything since. Three members have begun typing, then stopped, producing what observers describe as “the longest ellipsis in recorded history.”

A leaked memo circulating among participants confirms that every member is, in the memo’s words, “totally flexible” and is waiting for someone else to say, “I’m fine with anything.”

“This is a classic standoff,” said Dr. Marguerite Oyelaran-Pruitt, senior fellow in Collective Preference Deadlock at the Lindqvist Institute for Mild Opinions in Dayton, Ohio. “Everyone has a restaurant in mind. Everyone also believes that naming it would make them the person who picked the restaurant, and therefore the person responsible if the restaurant is bad. So they hold. They hold for days.”

According to Oyelaran-Pruitt, the thread has now passed what her institute calls the Sushi Threshold, the point at which someone traditionally suggests sushi, a place nobody wants but nobody will object to. “That hasn’t happened,” she said. “Frankly, I’m worried.”

The silence has begun to disrupt daily life. Restaurants report record numbers of empty tables, though a spokesperson for the National Restaurant Coalition said the industry is “cautiously optimistic,” noting that a small number of people have simply gone to Chipotle alone and said nothing.

Those closest to the crisis describe a tense atmosphere. “I saw it. I saw it right when it came in,” said Dale Kettering, 34, a member of the thread, who has reportedly composed and deleted the sentence “Honestly I could go for tacos” eleven times. “I don’t want to be the one to decide. But I also have a real preference, and it’s tacos. That’s the whole problem.”

Attempts to break the deadlock have so far failed. One member sent a thumbs-up reaction to the original message, an act the group has since interpreted as either agreement, sarcasm, or a threat. Another posted a link to a restaurant’s website with no comment, which was immediately ignored out of respect for the unwritten rule that the first person to suggest a place must also be prepared to defend it.

“At this point, I’d eat anywhere,” read one message drafted by a participant and never sent. “But I will not be the one who says that.”

Federal officials have declined to intervene, citing what a Department of Commerce spokesperson called “a long-standing policy of not telling Americans where to eat, as they will only say they’re fine with anything.”

Experts say the standoff will most likely end the way these standoffs always do: at roughly 9:40 p.m. on an unspecified night, when one member will write “ok I’m starving, can we just pick,” prompting 38 people to reply “yes!!” and one to suggest a place that closed in 2022.

At press time, the thread had come back to life briefly when a member asked if anyone was “open to Italian,” and was met with 40 replies of “sure!” followed by renewed, total silence.