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

Hopefully you get a decked out command center too.

Thank you. This should be pinned or something.

:)

gottem!

But have we found the seams yet though?

We need a Samwise "Bear the load!" meme

Wait, why would it ruin it?

I added a specific rule to disallow saying “load bearing”. So Claude is now saying “load handling”

Years ago, when I worked at Stripe (which had a somewhat unique and inventive lexicon) it was a common term. “Is this jank load-bearing?” someone might ask.

Kids In The Hall had a sketch about overuse of a word or phrase [1]. This is the world that Claude is building for us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lStcwT_RGrQ

It doesn't have to ruin it for you, but people are going to assume comments with it are AI generated.

LLMs (at least Claude) tends to overuse that significantly

In every document created by Claude.

I have never seen Claude use this phrase

If it was still running snow leopard that would explain it

Have a hundred upvotes

Maybe .unwrap()

They're saving a memory so this can't happen again.

That's on me. I've been giving confident advice that doesn't hold up in practice.

Hang on — I can apply a double tracked fix to the load bearing path, gated by provenance.

It must be tuned for rage-based engagement because Claude only ever uses the most obnoxious Claudisms on me despite constant reminders to knock it off.

Surprised there's instances still up

> asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news.

The capital letters don't make this astonishing. The padmapper vs. craigslist debate was nearly 15 years ago, most people were on craigslist's side (including me) and it was about somebody who was running a site in a less optimal but more human way vs. some startup looking for hockey-sticks.

But I was literally simping for the billionaire (maybe not quite yet then, don't know for sure if he managed it since) against scrapers. They were very much for-profit scrapers, unlike nitter, but the truth is the truth.

The only reason I support scraping Twitter is because it's yet another communications monopoly that was endlessly pushed on us by governments and massive corporations, even though it never made money, and once it finally got traction its priorities were to trash interop and manipulate content. The government should be dictating an interop protocol and expecting everyone to follow it, and instead it is encouraging media monopolies because they are an end run around the first amendment.

If the government created interop protocols for rental property, I'd have been against craigslist. Instead, it seemed very much like some startup play to steal craigslist's content to hopefully bury them, then sell on a valuation that included abusing their new monopoly and making us very much miss craigslist.

Sadly, facebook corralled and trained so many people for so long that their marketplace eventually killed craigslist for most things anyway (didn't have to buy padmapper after all.)

Why Reticulum when we have IP?

It's also easier to understand. For the internet to be fault tolerant you have to get rid of CDNs and assume everyone needs the same thing. That's more expensive than a centralized "internet" which relies on CDNs and fiber paths exclusive to the regions with most demand. Everything has been optimized for throughput for what is determined to be important, not rare fault tolerance

We don't need to gatekeep the internet, cloudflare does that for us

Huh. I thought they used to also do sentiment analysis of social media (Twitter, at least). I see that they definitely don't today, but has that always been the case?

observing is the result

Sharepoint is the cause of the outages?

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?

Traffic doesn’t need to be routed through it though, just tee’d to it,

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.

being done by No Such Agency.

This is the building from Control and the fact that 1. it's a real building and 2. it's an actual spy building is even crazier to me:

https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Oldest_House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game)

Explain the system in which you could capture all of these chats with no knowledge of anyone in these data centers. How are they routed to this NSA system or through some NSA device when these companies' compute are spread over hundreds of data centers?

> All of these endpoints use existing providers with decades-long history at this point

That is just factually inaccurate. Their data centers aren't old and they lease a lot of compute from companies that didn't exist 5 years ago.

I'm confused by your statement. Are you suggesting that these companies that have invested tens of billions in their networks and datacenters decided to create a shared single point of failure?

It happened yesterday.

So following this to the obvious conclusion, the NSA is responsible for the closure of the Straight of America, high tarrifs, dropping employment, and high gas prices?

Only if you ignore baseline rates. Which brings us back to my original point.

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?

But they accepted the transit fees, which means they endorsed the action.

The guild would not allow any action to jeopardize the flow of spice. Thus any attack on Dune is implicitly sanctioned, notwithstanding their spice trade with the Fremen.

Even today (and back when Dune was written), modern military tech is invincible to an enemy below a level of sophistication. The US used to hammer insurgents with Predator drones who had no ability to retaliate.

This playbook has only flipped due to a lot of cheap tech (and the machinery to make them) coming in uncotrollably to these countries has put them on a much more equal playing field.

Since the Guild controls what comes in, they can avoid this scenario from happening. They can control who can have what, and who can make what. Which I think is one of the true, deep explanations of why military tech in Dune is so weird and inefficient - essentially the efficiency and power of a weapon is dictated by how much the Guild charges for shipping them if they allow you to, at all. Which is how you end up with dudes with swords. It gives an idea of the level of technology in the universe that you can equip said dude with a nigh-impenetrable shield that fits in a belt buckle. I guess that's the result of optimizing for Guild transit fees, not real-world power.

Really it's not exactly a novel idea, but as I think more about it, it's uncanny how Dune (at least initially) is basically the fantasy Suez crisis and what followed. It explores the power dynamics very well, how factions can hold humanity hostage without firing a single shot, and how what they don't bother controlling comes to bite them in the ass.

> How could anyone wage war like this? The defenders will always outnumber the attackers.

Which is exactly what ends up happening, but it does take a bunch of extraordinary events.

We already know there is surveillance, but why would you default to that explanation for a downtime? As said by others monitoring the traffic isn’t done by routing through the NSA monitoring system, it’s not a bottleneck that would take down all those services. If you look at more details such as the timing it’s even less likely to be the case, but even as a default it’s not a reasonable explanation given the symptoms

The Sea Peoples were only a part of the reason, the other reasons included climate change, volcanic eruptions, disease etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Nobody is swapping out Claude for Grok, bro.

Nobody.

I bet they had to implement that manually to make it look like they failed too!

Gemini 3.8 which just came out sounds like it's very good and a great deal though.

Gemini said that?

Gemini is what I mostly use (good enough, basically free - or massively generous free limits, and to me Google as a company is a LOT less objectionable than all the US-based alternatives), but I don't recall it ever saying that.

OTOH, my basic assumption online is that there is no privacy, and free AI in exchange for acknowledged lack of privacy seems fair enough.

Nope. I am getting Gemini errors now...

Yep. Too many of us are still thinking that humans are the actors behind a lot of internet behaviors when automated systems/bots/scripts have been causing issues on conventional internet systems for years.

With AI it's even easier to trigger problems like you say. Capacity is so constrained by compute that outages are common. Because outages are common people/AI develop failover systems in their harness. When a big system has issues, suddenly everyone has issues.

It's almost an expected emergent behavior.

And isn't that the great lesson of AI?

The things we say publicly actually do matter and the post-modern descent into absurdity and nihilism has tangible negative consequences?

Part of the epstein class, dont forget.

Do you make the claim that AI is something more than a reflection of its training data?

I'm curious what other things you would argue influences an LLM's behavior.

I am also generally one to trust the claims of the people who train the models, though you're welcome to the highly improbable belief that they operate in a fantasy world.

Sorry, i was out of a spare scratch monkey.

https://madned.substack.com/p/always-mount-a-scratch-monkey

> will occasionally appear to take a swing or two in sync

Polyrhythm is the relevant topic.

> all these services are individually down a lot, and the downtimes were bound to sync up

But the topic for that is the poisson distribution.

You did this when you ran into an issue with a third party. The developers building this tool, throwing them at their own APIs are significantly less likely to run into a similar issue that may inspire similar action.