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Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

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381–390 of 763 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#382
post #334

Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage on Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers. https://downdetector.com/status/cloudflare/ https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/ https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

“load bearing” :) For once it’s appropriately used.

It's a good metaphor and I refuse to let AI ruin it for me.

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#383
post #281

Well no one said it yet so I will, "international actors" is at least a possibility. And I don't mean any specific country because pretty much anyone is a potential these days, which makes it a perfect cover for different anyones. Demonstrating vulnerability in the US's AI boom can move the markets. That's a financial incentive and a strong geopolitical one. More likely just cascading overload though: "Never attribut…

> cascading overload

I'd bet more on this. For one none of the coding tools have exponential backoff on retries

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#385
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The impact isn't as big too - Codex for example did not stop working for me. https://updog.ai/

[flagged]

They simply shared their experience. I would’ve thought it’s a full-blown outage, but clearly not.

You stepped in the room real stinky here. What’s with the attitude?

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#386
post #367
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to believe that enough people would flock to from Claude and Chat to Grok to cause an outage. I feel like Gemini is the dominant release valve in this case especially for enterprise.

Don't forget that there are a ton of tools out there that will automatically fall back in case of outage E.g. say you chose Sol as your default in Cursor, but Opus is your 2nd choice, it's going to give up on Sol after a few tries and switch to Opus Or you have copilot code reviews set up, and it falls back Etc

Yep. Too many of us are still thinking that humans are the actors behind a lot of internet behaviors when automated systems/bots/scripts have been causing issues on conventional internet systems for years.

With AI it's even easier to trigger problems like you say. Capacity is so constrained by compute that outages are common. Because outages are common people/AI develop failover systems in their harness. When a big system has issues, suddenly everyone has issues.

It's almost an expected emergent behavior.

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#387
post #281

Well no one said it yet so I will, "international actors" is at least a possibility. And I don't mean any specific country because pretty much anyone is a potential these days, which makes it a perfect cover for different anyones. Demonstrating vulnerability in the US's AI boom can move the markets. That's a financial incentive and a strong geopolitical one. More likely just cascading overload though: "Never attribut…

Come on. Things still break. Technology isn't _that_ mature.

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#388
post #311

Think of it like one big distributed system. OpenAI is down, so people migrate to Claude, now this one gets overloaded and goes down, etc. So not a coincidence, one went down first and users migrated causing further DOS. At least that's my guess.

Especially considering memory/gpu/compute are scarce so these services are likely running with very little buffer.

Any GPU that isn't running at 100% is a wasted GPU.

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#389
post #334

Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage on Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers. https://downdetector.com/status/cloudflare/ https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/ https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

Dane says Cloudflare has no service disruptions: https://x.com/dok2001/status/2095538619603628388?s=20

Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

#390
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidently it annoyed you enough to create one too. Remember, guys, there's one more day until Friday!

Friday is when the janitors come by with the floor polishers and plug them into the same socket as the Macbook. They are not taking the blame this time!

Just writing to say that I appreciated the nostalgia, even if your references were lost on the other responders.
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