AI A goes down so all of its traffic overloads B which overloads C...
Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
661–670 of 781 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#662If it's a boring reason, they should just say so. To decline to comment seems very fishy.
Read the article. It doesn't match the title. OpenAI says it was a boring reason: a routing issue.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#663It’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.
OpenAI and Anthropic have their systems in dozens of data centers, including using compute from the major cloud providers. Are you implying that all of these data centers (and many of their employees) are involved in helping the the US government secretly tap every single AI conversation by routing them through some unknown network/device? Or did a couple of companies with poor uptime records happen to have overlappi…
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Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#664It’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.
OpenAI and Anthropic have their systems in dozens of data centers, including using compute from the major cloud providers. Are you implying that all of these data centers (and many of their employees) are involved in helping the the US government secretly tap every single AI conversation by routing them through some unknown network/device? Or did a couple of companies with poor uptime records happen to have overlappi…
What makes you think they'd need to touch every datacenter? All of these endpoints use existing providers with decades-long history at this point, and network monitoring is already a proven 'feature' of the agencies they'd need to co-exist with over their lifetimes.
If anything, Occam's Razor would point to a common denominator with all of them, given it wasn't network-wide, as far as i know.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#665Isn't it simply that they are all renting compute from SpaceX (or whatever the company is called that offers these gpus)?
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#666It’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.
Wouldn't be surprised: Snowden's revelations 10 plus years ago already showed how the NSA was injected into the data centers of Social Media, it's only logical that they would now demand to be injected into the biggest, most information providing data stream of the planet of the present: LLM services.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#667Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On the contrary, it lets you MITM encrypted communications by swapping the website's original certificate for the "well trusted TLS cert"
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#668Earlier 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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#669It’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.
OpenAI and Anthropic have their systems in dozens of data centers, including using compute from the major cloud providers. Are you implying that all of these data centers (and many of their employees) are involved in helping the the US government secretly tap every single AI conversation by routing them through some unknown network/device? Or did a couple of companies with poor uptime records happen to have overlappi…
I'd say Occam's Razor leans easily to the former as well, given the history of projects that Snowden revealed and were never shut down, plus all of the cooperation with the federal government that's being touted in recent announcements from both companies.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#670I thought the consensus on here yesterday was that it was likely caused by cascading failures. OpenAI had an issue during their GPT-6 rollout, taking down their service. This caused a lot of OpenAI users to push their requests (or a larger share of their requests) to Claude and/or Grok, which pushed their load high enough to cause outages.
We used to experience similar effects when I worked at a CDN. If one CDN would go down, we would see immediate spikes in traffic. Luckily, we had procedures for that to prevent overload, but the AI folks might not have the capacity/capabilities to handle that sort of cascade yet.