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

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631–640 of 775 posts

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

#631

It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie.

Could you expand on this more? It's not clear to me what this is implying.

Think snowden.

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

#632

It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie.

Could you expand on this more? It's not clear to me what this is implying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

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

#635

It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie.

Yes, this would give the US gov: 1. A universal kill switch. 2. A way to monitor foreign AI usage.

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

#636
Neither of these companies have stellar uptime records. Their downtime episodes overlapped in this instance. In this case, it was a partial downtime for both.

Also, OpenAI is saying what caused it:

> "A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms"

Anthropic stated their issue started earlier:

> "The company began alerting about a “partial outage” at 6:23 am PT on Thursday that involved “elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.”

I don't get why everyone reaches for an extraordinary explanation when the ordinary will do: both of these companies have quite a bit of downtime.

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

#637

It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie.

Could you expand on this more? It's not clear to me what this is implying.

[deleted]

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

#639

The OpenAI outage lasted only 15 minutes and when it happened everyone started to use the other models which created super heavy load for them. This then cascaded into them all being down. Does this really need an explanation?

it wasn't timed like a cascade, and it relies on the premise that every single frontier provider is working so efficiently that they spend exactly what they need to provide for their exact market with perfect margins.

I do not believe personally that 1) they can forecast their load that perfectly 2) they chose to remain that inflexible in a world where they are at each others' throats and a single meme can cause bursts of activity.

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

#640
FTA:

Anthropic: 6:23 am PT.

OpenAI: 7:43 am PT.

Watched it happen. Doesn't look like traffic moving off OpenAI took out the others. Looked like the opposite. The Anthropic thread was initially chock full of marketing accounts claiming "Last straw! I finally moved to Codex and I'm so happy! No problems there!" - and then they all got deleted when Codex went down too.

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