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

[fny]

I find it hard to believe that enough people would flock to from Claude and Chat to Grok to cause an outage. I feel like Gemini is the dominant release valve in this case especially for enterprise.

[nevir → fny]

Don't forget that there are a ton of tools out there that will automatically fall back in case of outage

E.g. say you chose Sol as your default in Cursor, but Opus is your 2nd choice, it's going to give up on Sol after a few tries and switch to Opus

Or you have copilot code reviews set up, and it falls back

Etc

[pixl97 → nevir]

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.

[baq → fny]

It’s cursor’s model so plausible, lots of folks use cursor still.

[wahnfrieden → fny]

Compared with ChatGPT, those services have a minuscule amount of users. It shouldn’t be surprising that a ChatGPT outage causes Claude and others to go down.