Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
651–660 of 786 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#652Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
grep is pretty fast
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
I dont think it requires a lot. I think of them as data hoarders more than anything else. It doesnt seem out of their capabilities to store a ton of chats. Maybe they're having scaling problems with the increased data rates they're hoarding and it led to an outage.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
it's fair to say they do and have for ages... it's not that hard to assume a well trusted TLS cert is under their control.
What does having a "well trusted TLS cert" enable for them in this case, exactly?
Having a magical cert doesn't mean you can just intercept everything.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#656It’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.
It’s aliens
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#657Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#658Neither 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…
[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#659It could be as simple as a new model (astra) was released which takes more resources combined with a surge in usage due to novelty took down OpenAI. Meanwhile everyone at big companies have the ability to switch models and moved to Anthropic pushing it too over the edge.
People keep saying this "everyone can switch" thing, but it's not my experience at $VeryBigCorp. We don't have an Anthropic contract at all. Is this different in other places? The bigger and more bureaucratic an org is, the less I would expect it to have contracts with all the providers. Curious about others' experiences.
Yeah, I think there are lots of places that have a semi-official preferred AI vendor but also some backup subscriptions floating around. For example, at my workplace, we generally use Claude, but I also have some kind of Codex subscription too, which I'd use if Claude went down.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#660Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
"AI Traffic" is just traffic. If the infrastructure exists to monitor/buffer traffic (it does) then this can be monitored as well. Whether this hiccup was due to them hitting their limits briefly (or turning it on, or etc) who knows.