Ask HN: Why are OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down? Coincidence?
I noticed that OpenAI, Claude, and Grok are all down at the same time. Is this just a coincidence, or is there a common underlying cause? I'm curious if others have observed this and have any insights into why these major AI services would experience simultaneous outages.
They all rent compute from SpaceXAI
Maybe the stack behind it is down, like AWS or something
I kinda assume it's because one went down and a large amount of work shifted to another. I'm also aware that they have overlap in some areas on data centers.
The Thundering Herd has thundered, apparently.
- kibae
Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage on Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers.
https://downdetector.com/status/cloudflare/
https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/
- juujian
Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.
- Insanity
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.
So not a coincidence, one went down first and users migrated causing further DOS. At least that's my guess.
- Linello
What about a hard-takeoff scenario of an unleashed OpenAI Astra taking other models down for computational resources control?
- steammaho
It was so down that my claude desktop app crashed fully that I couldn't restart. And then after uninstall I couldn't install it again. Vibecoded apps are so wonderful in their stability
- docheinestages
My gut feeling tells me it has something to do with Cloudflare.
Along with AWS, they're two of the main suspects in such incidents.
- sebbul
Traffic rerouting through NSA had a hiccup…
- victor22
because they resell the same service? duh?
- bojangleslover
I'm not sure if this is CF. Cursor, GCP and AWS had some errors. GCP AFAIK can route fully independently of CF. My money would be on a fiber backbone provider (Megaport, Zayo, Lumen).
- paxys
Boring answer – all these services are individually down a lot, and the downtimes were bound to sync up. Similar to the pendulum synchronization effect.