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

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

#751
post #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.

It’s not really a secret that the US government already has both, they control ICANN and are monitoring traffic around the globe since decades

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

#752

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…

Do you know the probability of all these companies being down at precisely the same time?

Pretty high?

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

#753

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.

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…

Ok, then where's the report? Don't they usually release a retrospective report after outages?

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

#754

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.

Why would you default to that explanation? That’s not at all a reasonable default, and I say that as something pretty paranoid with regards to US surveillance

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

#755

I work at OpenAI and I was the Incident Commander for yesterday's outage. We had a routing error within our infra that caused issues for some of our products. It was not related to the Astra launch. We don't comment on other providers' outages.

Shouldn't Astra be the Incident Commander?

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

#756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very likely yes. I wouldn't be surprised if they were hosted from the same datacenters even. There has been a story every few weeks about how Musk has sublet X.ai capacity for one company or another. This whole thing makes me thing about a passage in Dune where they mentioned the Spacing Guild transported entire fleets of ships in isolated compartments and leaving said compartments was a capital offense. This way, en…

The economics of this kind of warfare make no sense to me. The Harkonens must have been incredibly wealthy by running the spice trade, but even after years of saving and plotting said that the transit fees to move the armies by the Guild were ruinous. How could anyone wage war like this? The defenders will always outnumber the attackers.

https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-pa... Lays out an interesting take on this: that armies are quite small, even on developed worlds, because the cost of equipping them is enormous — and the technological advantage is absurd enough that you don’t need a large army. When 300 men can hold a planet, why would you need 1000?

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

#760

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.

Why would you default to that explanation? That’s not at all a reasonable default, and I say that as something pretty paranoid with regards to US surveillance

Looking at history, it's much more reasonable to assume there's surveillance, since there are whole branches of the government, and departments, that exist for surveillance in the goal of "national security", which this easily falls into. See Marissa Mayer explaining that it's not an option to refuse [1]. I assume this is just the same ole' Room 641A [2].

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-report...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

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