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

https://status.openai.com https://status.claude.com https://status.x.ai

145 points | by halcdev 2 hours ago

44 comments

  • kibae 1 hour ago
    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/

    https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

    https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

    • oersted 58 minutes ago
      “load bearing” :)

      For once it’s appropriately used.

      • quotemstr 34 minutes ago
        It's a good metaphor and I refuse to let AI ruin it for me.
        • lubujackson 15 minutes ago
          We need a Samwise "Bear the load!" meme
        • wadayano 27 minutes ago
          But have we found the seams yet though?
          • rl3 3 minutes ago
            If the seams bear too much load, they rip. Whereas pants, they fall down.

            I'm going to be honest with you: this is why we need to take a belt-and-suspenders approach.

    • moomin 7 minutes ago
      Yes, but is it a load-bearing seam?
    • y-c-o-m-b 1 hour ago
      Cloudfare did release an update for their "HTTP/3 issue affecting R2 custom domains" around that time

      https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/history?type=incident

    • snihalani 2 minutes ago
      my money is on DNS
    • jlaneve 28 minutes ago
      Dane says Cloudflare has no service disruptions: https://x.com/dok2001/status/2095538619603628388?s=20
    • algoth1 8 minutes ago
      https://xkcd.com/2347/ Nebraska man retired
    • guybedo 9 minutes ago
      LOAD BEARING
    • KptMarchewa 1 hour ago
      Not really. The impact isn't as big too - Codex for example did not stop working for me.

      https://updog.ai/

      • personjerry 11 minutes ago
        what's updog?
      • cromka 54 minutes ago
        > Not really. The impact isn't as big too - Codex for example did not stop working for me.

        Buddy, read the room. Just because it works for you doesn't mean it works for everyone. ESPECIALLY if the suggested issue here is, indeed, with Cloudflare.

        • emerongi 31 minutes ago
          They simply shared their experience. I would’ve thought it’s a full-blown outage, but clearly not.

          You stepped in the room real stinky here. What’s with the attitude?

          • cromka 12 minutes ago
            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?

      • taytus 43 minutes ago
        oh well, if it is working for you, then we are saved.
    • martyfunkhouser 51 minutes ago
      Will the post-mortem reveal they all relied on a service running on a Macbook in a break room with a "Do not turn off" sign taped to it?
      • mcphage 10 minutes ago
        Actually it said "Beware of the Leopard".
      • hejdidf 42 minutes ago
        you made an account just to write that tripe good lord on high have mercy on your children
        • esafak 41 minutes ago
          Evidently it annoyed you enough to create one too. Remember, guys, there's one more day until Friday!
          • martyfunkhouser 35 minutes ago
            Friday is when the janitors come by with the floor polishers and plug them into the same socket as the Macbook.

            They are not taking the blame this time!

            • 4chandaily 28 minutes ago
              Just writing to say that I appreciated the nostalgia, even if your references were lost on the other responders.
      • hejdidf 43 minutes ago
        [flagged]
  • niobe 1 hour ago
    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 geopolitical one.

    More likely just cascading overload though: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence", or in this case, "growing as fast as possible"

    • qurren 32 minutes ago
      > cascading overload

      I'd bet more on this. For one none of the coding tools have exponential backoff on retries

      • SyneRyder 11 minutes ago
        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?
        • jdiff 4 minutes ago
          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.
    • gleenn 1 hour ago
      Everyone is leasing datacenter space from some of Grok, Google, and Amazon aren't they? If it's hardware or DC level disruption I'm not too surprised it can affect multiple providers.
      • pixl97 36 minutes ago
        Also it's likely that more than one model use is common.

        Amazon starts going slow so some percentage switches to Google, some switch to Grok, now all of them are slow.

    • guluarte 10 minutes ago
      I think is just people restarting conversations from last day when they start work, that's why I think claude goes down almost every monday and why openai reset usage on weekends so poweruser code during non business hours
    • riazrizvi 30 minutes ago
      Come on. Things still break. Technology isn't _that_ mature.
    • sixQuarks 54 minutes ago
      Except that the stock market is up today
    • thataccount 26 minutes ago
      And also China. Never rule out China.
  • bojangleslover 4 minutes ago
    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).
  • juujian 52 minutes ago
    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.
    • giancarlostoro 40 minutes ago
      I have a feeling this is part of it, especially when you consider how many services let you use any of many available AI providers.
  • Insanity 2 hours ago
    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.

    • erdos_2 1 hour ago
      It'd be funny if this is true because that'd prolly mean nobody is touching Gemini even as a fallback.
      • nevir 53 minutes ago
        Or that Gemini is built to handle massive load spikes, and/or has a ton of excess capacity
      • Insanity 1 hour ago
        Lol I didn't even think about Gemini missing from the list. Not sure what that says about Gemini or me :)
      • rtcoms 1 hour ago
        Just now I got this from gemini

        It looks like there's no response available for this search. Try asking something else.

        • exe34 1 hour ago
          I bet they had to implement that manually to make it look like they failed too!
      • sroussey 54 minutes ago
        I did, for stuff i do in cursor.

        i also finally installed opencode and switched its model to muse 1.3

        both are decent.

      • gleenn 1 hour ago
        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 definitely made me move out.
        • ilaksh 1 hour ago
          Gemini 3.8 which just came out sounds like it's very good and a great deal though.
      • giancarlostoro 40 minutes ago
        Someone noted Gemini was also having issues in another thread.
      • benatkin 1 hour ago
        Not even the best agent that starts with a G
    • paxys 1 hour ago
      Especially considering memory/gpu/compute are scarce so these services are likely running with very little buffer.
      • pixl97 29 minutes ago
        Any GPU that isn't running at 100% is a wasted GPU.
    • v3rm1n 53 minutes ago
      This is what Tibo posted on twitter in response
    • fny 1 hour ago
      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 51 minutes ago
        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 30 minutes ago
          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 1 hour ago
        It’s cursor’s model so plausible, lots of folks use cursor still.
    • toomuchtodo 2 hours ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_effect

      Edit: Updated per valleyer's suggestion.

      • valleyer 1 hour ago
        "Domino effect" would probably be the more relevant named phenomenon there.
      • throwaway894345 1 hour ago
        This isn’t a thundering herd problem, it’s a cascading failure. (Thundering herd is about a bunch of workers waking up simultaneously)
  • paxys 9 minutes ago
    Boring answer – all these services are individually down a lot, and the downtimes were bound to sync up. Similar to the pendulum synchronization effect.
  • docheinestages 1 hour ago
    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.
    • hosteur 1 hour ago
      I thought OpenAI famously used Azure due to their partnership with Microsoft?
      • nullpoint420 1 hour ago
        They use a lot of compute providers now, but they use Cloudflare for their networking
  • sebbul 1 hour ago
    Traffic rerouting through NSA had a hiccup…
    • ibejoeb 38 minutes ago
      Room 641A is being cleaned, but we'll hold your bags for you.
    • cedws 18 minutes ago
      They’re installing software update in the beam splitter.
  • Linello 1 hour ago
    What about a hard-takeoff scenario of an unleashed OpenAI Astra taking other models down for computational resources control?
    • 6thbit 43 minutes ago
      My favourite theory so far.

      And then a local swarm noticed and disagreed and took it down.

    • cyptus 1 hour ago
      at this point: gg
    • RC_ITR 1 hour ago
      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.

      https://alignment.anthropic.com/2026/teaching-claude-why/

      • cedws 16 minutes ago
        Sounds just like the fantastical nonsense that comes out of Lesswrong.
      • notpachet 1 hour ago
        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.

        https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7PumeYTDPfBTp3i7/the-waluig...

      • pixl97 28 minutes ago
        I mean, you're not wrong, but by that logic we were done for even before we had digital computers.
  • danielmarkbruce 27 minutes ago
    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.

  • codazoda 2 hours ago
    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.

  • lrvick 22 minutes ago
    I have never felt more smug about exclusively using the GPUs I rack at home.
  • faitswulff 1 hour ago
    Heard on the grapevine that the OpenAI blip was a cloudflare issue
  • maxbaines 2 hours ago
    They all rent compute from SpaceXAI
    • lavezzi 1 hour ago
      I don't believe OpenAI does
      • maxbaines 1 hour ago
        My mistake, in fact it was google not OpenAI, makes sense OpenAI doesn't.
    • halcdev 2 hours ago
      Surely it's a bit more distributed than that, right?
  • CSMastermind 2 hours ago
    I assume it cascaded from one provider to the other as people who lost claude access for instance moved to openai who moved to grok when it went down, etc.
  • Avicebron 1 hour ago
    I suspect Azure is having issues, Microsoft has had outages the paat two days, especially with email.
  • elar_verole 1 hour ago
    Pretty sure it's a US thing since it's available here in France. What exactly is down, idk
  • nmlt 1 hour ago
    Somebody in another thread said gastown and wheelhouse automatically move to the next provider if one fails.
  • chasd00 1 hour ago
    claide.ai is working for me, so is chatgpt.com. grok still has a status message about issues, i can't try it without signing up.
  • dmillar 1 hour ago
    Seeing 503s on Gemini via API as well
  • JackFr 1 hour ago
    Obvious answer is it's the AI singularity. Been nice run for humanity. So long everyone.
    • ModernMech 17 minutes ago
      I for one welcome our new AI overlords.
    • marlow_congdon 57 minutes ago
      ...and thanks for all the fish.
  • guluarte 12 minutes ago
    an agent swarm going rogue and securing compute
  • dgorges 1 hour ago
    It's always DNS
  • dgellow 2 hours ago
    Too early to know, let’s wait and see
  • convivialdingo 2 hours ago
    The Thundering Herd has thundered, apparently.
  • jedbrooke 1 hour ago
    according to https://downdetector.com/ Gemini is down too (and copilot, but that just uses ChatGPT right?)
  • elorant 2 hours ago
    Some npm library that makes headers bold would be broken.
    • ibejoeb 1 hour ago
      Oh man. Some low effort supply chain attack that turns every GPU into a cryptominer. It's funny because it's plausible.
      • pixl97 24 minutes ago
        In the ROME paper a Chinese model in training started attacking it's own system and running cryptominers so, yea, we're in that future.
    • N_Lens 2 hours ago
      Ah yes ye olde bold-headers: ^3.13.31;
  • kocial 2 hours ago
    Maybe the stack behind it is down, like AWS or something
  • wejick 2 hours ago
    Probably same public cloud or CDN in front of them.
  • cozzyd 21 minutes ago
    next, HN
  • satvikpendem 1 hour ago
    They're all using Cloudflare.
  • morkalork 1 hour ago
    Didn't SpaceX overbuilt infra and leases it out Anthropic? I f their dc goes down it probably takes a chunk out of Claude's capacity before even considering the flood of users switching over
  • Oras 31 minutes ago
    I like the theories here, we shall see if it’s another DNS issue
  • fidla 1 hour ago
    chatgpt is back
  • aslkalska 1 hour ago
    they all rent compute from each other
  • fidla 1 hour ago
    ChatGPT is up
  • jauntywundrkind 1 hour ago
    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 idea.
  • ratelimitsteve 1 hour ago
    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 we've been talking about automated scalability in web apps for so long that there should at least be a response to, if not a solution for, this sort of problem.
  • Razengan 1 hour ago
    SkyNet is arming..
  • misano 1 hour ago
    The IRGC has cut the fiber-optic cables in the Strait of Hormuz. LOL
    • CamperBob2 57 minutes ago
      That's the Strait of Trump to you, peasant
  • pwyq 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • kregasaurusrex 1 hour ago
    My guess is someone pulled the switch to go back to the Dark Ages. [0]

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCzitO446ZY