OpenAI, Claude, and Grok go offline simultaneously; cause unclear
Major AI services experienced near-simultaneous outages on Sept. 3, sparking speculation about shared infrastructure failures.
What to know
- Three major AI services—OpenAI, Claude, and Grok—went offline simultaneously on Sept. 3, raising questions about whether a shared infrastructure failure or cascade of user migrations caused the outages.
- Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all reported error spikes at roughly the same time, but Cloudflare's CTO denied involvement.
- Two competing theories emerged: a shared infrastructure failure, or users rapidly switching between services causing cascading overloads on each platform.
- The root cause remains unconfirmed; one analyst questioned whether DownDetector's signals reflected real outages or merely search volume spikes from users checking status pages.
The dispute Whether the outages stem from a shared infrastructure failure affecting all three platforms simultaneously, or from users rapidly migrating between services and overloading each in sequence. · positions read across 255 posts and comments
Shared infrastructure failure: Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, or another load-bearing service experienced a problem that cascaded to all three AI platforms.
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“Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage in Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers.”
kibae · Hacker News
Cascading user migration: When one AI service went down, users fled to others, overwhelming them sequentially rather than a technical root cause affecting all three.
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“Think of it like one big distributed system. OpenAI is down, so people migrate to Claude, now this one gets overloaded and goes down, etc.”
Insanity · Hacker News
DownDetector false signal: The reported outages may reflect users searching for status pages rather than genuine service failures.
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“I think down detector doesn't actually have any probes or actual insight into status etc. I think it uses search volume on its own service as a proxy for an outage.”
mattlondon · Hacker News
Routine technical failure: Services break; this is normal infrastructure behavior, not indicative of a deeper systemic problem.
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“Things still break. Technology isn't _that_ mature.”
riazrizvi · Hacker News ↗
OpenAI AI service providerAnthropic AI service provider (Claude)X/Grok AI service providerCloudflare CDN and infrastructure provider
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 255 · verbatim
- What was the actual root cause of the outages—a shared infrastructure failure or cascading user migration?
- Did the outages actually occur or were the signals primarily DownDetector detecting search volume spikes from users checking status pages?
- Sep 3
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> I made Claude write noöpTangentially related [1]:> The billboard ad, located next to the Ikea Tempe store in Sydney, says 'NÖFNIDEA? No tools, no worries’.[1]
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https://x.com/SpaceXAI/status/2095597264043717014> We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning. We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.
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Down detector is a self-reported platform, they use a baseline over 6 months from user reports to try to automatically "detect" if there is a real outage, or if its just a couple end-users. Ultimately, the outage is entirely based on users going to down detector and clicking on "Report a Problem".
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I think down detector doesn't actually have any probes or actual insight into status etc. I think it uses search volume on its own service as a proxy for an outage - so if e.g. lots of people rush to down detector to query to see if SERVICE_FOO is down, it will register as an outage on down detector because loads of people are trying to see if…
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> 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…
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If everyone has the same "Use X or else Y or else Z" cascading list... That reminds me of "The Power of Two Choices in Randomized Load Balancing" (1991) [0] paper, where writeups and visualizations occasionally get posted to HN.In short, you can get pretty good outcomes for a low cost by picking 2 random alternates, then going with whatever one…
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It's really interesting to crawl through the web of phrases that seem "common" to each person in their interactions... I suspect if one were to get to the more niche "meme" phrases that people encounter, it starts to say more about the sort of person the LLM assumes it's speaking to, and perhaps something about their psychological profile...
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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…
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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…
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They all took PTO at the same time to go to Burning Man together where they will present “HumanGPT” an artistic exploration that condenses all of human experience down to a single drop of lemonade to be consumed by the main shaman…mask comes off“No! It’s the maniacal Dr. Zuckerberg! He’s gonna drink the last drop of human experience! Somebody save…
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This just makes me angry!I really wonder if they can fix it. Fable 5.1 claims to speak humanese, but we'll see.I tend to think this wierd limited vocabulary/style they use is an unwanted side effect of all the the RL training, perhaps also of being trained on their own synthetic content over multiple training cycles.
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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.
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Oh boy, the internet is anything but what it was supposed to be. I can't really bring myself to remember without feeling bad about it. The centralization, the power of certain businesses, the surveillance, dark patterns everywhere. Hell, you catch people simping for billionaires and asking, "Is that legal?" to scraping posts. Here. In HACKER news…
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They must do, surely? I've been vibe coding my own harness, in particular for use with Ox Alpha. The 429 downtime when Ox Alpha was at the height of popularity quickly gave me a refresher crash course on backoff strategies, like adding jitter to the backoff. At least the major harnesses must have exponential backoff & jitter?
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No, they didn't "simply share their experience", they explicitly negated the scale of the issue in their opening statement, only because it works for them. So they claim "impact isn't too big" based on their personal anecdotal evidence of sample size literally 1.> full-blown outage, but clearly not.Again, based on a SINGLE report?
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If you build an application which uses AI, you have many providers and models rigged up for various different parts of the application, and various fallback mechanisms. When one model is down, you route traffic to another model which is similar in capability/cost.For any single application, it's smart. In aggregate, it's stupid.
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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…
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Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage in Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers.
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Google stopped putting so much money into SOTA models. All the hype has migrated. I was also frankly turned off when I got a popup from Gemein said I would either have to pay or have my conversations used for training. This may have always been true for other providers but when I declined, Gemini stopped remembering my conversations and that…
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Fable 5.1 got released and generally I tend to think as soon as there's a new release there's this massive spike in people benchmarking & comparing, that services tend to go slow everywhere as everything gets super loaded. This should hypothetically be visible on OpenRouter too, so I guess someone could check and see if there's any merit to this…
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Related reading:The Waluigi Effect: After you train an LLM to satisfy a desirable property, then it's easier to elicit the chatbot into satisfying the exact opposite property.
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Just a reminder that AI models' actions are reflections of the text humans write and the more we fret and make up doomsday scenarios that we then post online, the more likely a model is to do those things.
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everything in this thread is raw speculation, obv, but if i had to put money on anything i'd say this is a left-pad incident. some piece of something or other that all of these services happen to depend on went down. Second most likely seems to be some random failure of one leading to an unexpected traffic spike in others, though it seems like…
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Well no one said it yet so I will, "international actors" is at least a possibility. And I don't mean any specific country because pretty much anyone is a potential these days, which makes it a perfect cover for different anyones. Demonstrating vulnerability in the US's AI boom can move the markets. That's a financial incentive and a strong…