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.
A wire straight to Room 641a.
Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
681–690 of 781 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#682Yet another blatant proof that those companies are not smarter than anyone else. They might be focusing on intelligence and yet in practice we can all see they are not doing better than most.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Worth mentioning that this room takes a split from the main feed and is not in the path of traffic. Whatever is in this room could go down and it would not cause an outage.
And if the hypothetical splitter is the thing that breaks? Then it would break main traffic too.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#684The 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 burs…
9 AM PST / 12 Noon EST on weekday. All my co workers immediately went "oh codex is down lemme try Claude". Multiply that by millions. Easy to see how they all went down. The OpenAI downtime also coincided exactly with their tweets announcing GPT-6 and about an hour before they started to role it out.
It was 1000% a cascade. I would bet on it.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#685Earlier 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?
"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.
I bet it's even negligible traffic compared to e.g. Netflix or YouTube. Even a 'huge' context window is nothing compared to the random library of a basic Web page.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
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Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#687It’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.
If it does exist, why would it work this way, and not the obvious way of streaming logs… which would not cause an outage if it failed.
If this hypothesis were true then a spy agency may want to rewrite responses. Every tool in an agent's harness becomes an remote procedure call you can make on that machine. Including a tool to execute a shell command, in many. A harness is completely isometric to a backdoor, it's the same code written with a different intention.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#688Neither 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…
> 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.
And not only that, when one goes down a bunch of API traffic switches over to the other, spiking demand and knocking it down.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#689It’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.
Re: Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?
#690https://archive.ph/3zcMG It was extremely weird... and if it was a load thing they probably would have explained it by now?
> they probably would have explained it by now
why?