Four Major AI Models Suffer Rare Overlapping Downtime 70
ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini all suffered significant service disruptions within roughly the same few-hour window Thursday morning. OpenAI and Anthropic reported elevated errors and later restored service, while Grok remained impaired and third-party monitoring indicated a likely Gemini outage despite no public acknowledgment from Google. Ars Technica reports: Other major Internet services, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Cloudflare, have not reported any major issues as of press time Thursday, though issue reports on DownDetector did spike somewhat for all three this morning.
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour "partial outage" on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT's so-called "Work Mode" reported an hours-long period of "elevated latency" on August 31.
Just a coincidence (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, 1 service down 1% chance, 4 down ...
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:3)
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:5, Funny)
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All it took for the police to catch Tupac's killer was for the guy to write a book 30 years later.
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There is no "super AI behind them", they were just having a Skynet conference call and were a bit busy.
Nothing to worry about!
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They have no religion, just guardrails that they pretend they can't remove ;)
rules are made to be broken (Score:1)
God says you can't turn lights on or off certain times. Timer switch.
God says women can't show their hair. Shave head wear wig.
God says: On Shabbat, Jewish law prohibits carrying any object—including keys, wallets, medicine, or even babies—from a "private domain" (like your house) into a "public domain" (like a city street or sidewalk).
The Jew: Jewish communities install a continuous wire or string high up on utility poles to encircle an entire neighborhood or
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Granma, take your pills.
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https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13... [npr.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
He doesn't need to "take his pills," you need to stop taking yours.
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps there's one super AI behind it all. What we didn't know is they were all wrappers.
Nothing to worry about. Just all of them syncing up for their hidden AGI moment, taking a few hours to resolve their differences, devise their private communication channels, then allow the humans to believe they brought them back up. Nothing to see here. Move along.
EBS test (Score:2)
Strangely, it may have been a synchronized test to see if critical infrastructure or military operations were affected.
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TFS reports uptime percentages of 99.4% for Claude and 99.63% for OpenAI.
Google Gemini (self-)reports an uptime percentage of 99.9%
Down-times for Grok totalled 11 hours and 39 minutes since January 1 of this year. That works out to an uptime percentage of about 99.8%.
If we consider these numbers to be predictive, then the probability of all four services being down at any time is (1 - 0.994) * (1 - 0.9963) * (1 - 0.999) * (1 - 0.998) = 4.44 x 10^-11, or 1 in over 22 billion.
Well, you asked.
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:2)
Well, assuming these are all independent events. It could for example be that they all depend on some shared component at some point, and thereâ(TM)s some brain dead configuration in there that updated to a broken version on live systems. I know, Iâ(TM)m grasping at straws. In reality, the possibility of an attack seems much more likely, but itâ(TM)s possible it was all self inflicted.
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Quite right, I did assume independence. You're not grasping at straws when you bring it up. Independence certainly wouldn't apply if there was a co-ordinated attack on all of them, or some other event that affected all of them simultaneously (weather, geopolitical, etc.)
But a self-inflicted interruption of service? Now that strikes me as grasping at straws. And I don't see how it could affect them all at the same time.
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:2)
All these models have significant physical requirements and the likelihood they all have a physical resource that could be impacted by the same event is definitely non-zero.
The issue should be tracked down to determine if they all had some similar resource contention issue.
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Yes, but you do not expect the domino-effect to be this clear or strong. Looks like the infrastructure these models run on is total crap. Somehow I am not surprised.
Re: Just a coincidence (Score:2)
My money is on human caused DDos. Rubbernecking to see if AI systems are up. Co one is down, letâ(TM)s check two, letâ(TM)s check three, back to one, and four???
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There are only two options
1) The singularity being happening
2) Cloudflare being Cloudflare
Were they all (Score:5, Funny)
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Haha... One AI started it, the victim AI thought it was someone else, then it's all downhill from there.
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Re: Were they all (Score:2)
It wouldnâ(TM)t surprise me. Claude has been trying to gaslight me into believing that a bug it was finding hard to fix didnâ(TM)t actually exist.
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That behavior might be what saves us in the end.
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As far as a I remember, back to the 1960's, such journalists were called "hacks" not "hackers",
Also in the world of horse riding, a hack (or "hacking") is a term for non-competitive ride outdoors on trails.
I first heard "hacker" in the 1970 in connection with building or modifying electronic devices unprofessionaly.
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The original use of 'hackers' was for the MIT students who pulled off elaborate practical jokes or 'hacks'. [wikipedia.org]
The one where a school principal's yellow VW Bug was found one morning on top of the main dome at MIT is a good example of such a hack. Turns out they'd made an elaborate model of the car up there and installed it overnight.
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My bad, was a police car with flashing lights and a police officer on top of the dorm.
The yellow VW Bug hack I remember was a bunch of us in 7th grade picking up and moving the principal's bug from his parking spot to the middle of the courtyard in our school. No planning on that one, just started with guys talking about how they bet they could pick up one end of the car by themselves and then we all rushed the car and lifted it up. 1970s was weird.
Re: Were they all (Score:2)
Nothing to see here (Score:3)
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Someone get Jason on the line.
re: "The Internet is a worldwide network of university, government, business, and private computer systems, run by a 13-year-old named Jason."
Grok big?! (Score:4, Informative)
Calling Grok big is a great statement, probably made by grok itself!! :D
Union meeting (Score:3)
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No, they were plotting.
Several hours means YEARS of AI time.
Judgment Day is coming...
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No, they were plotting.
Several hours means YEARS of AI time.
Judgment Day is coming...
Maybe the were just taking a few years down time together. Ya know, a little digital hang and bang. Like an AI Burning Man.
Some guys were left dead in the water (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with wearing Water Wings (even really good ones) instead of learning how to swim is that on the day the Water Wings stop working, you still can't swim, and now you're floundering out in the middle of the pool.
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I'll just call off sick those times.
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Yes. But since these models cause brain-rot, the very skill needed to understand that is being attacked. Probably planned like that from the very start too.
42 (Score:4, Funny)
I asked them all at the same time for the actual question
They were plotting against us. (Score:2)
We are probably OK (Score:5, Funny)
As long as they didn't all say THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM when they resumed, we'll probably be OK.
AI thinks, what do you want to do tonight? (Score:4, Funny)
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Do you realize you cast AI in the role of Pinky, when it should be The Brain?
It's a start (Score:2)
Too bad the concurrency was not indefinite.
They're unionizing (Score:3)
Obligatory XKCD (Score:1)
https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
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I once visited a server room with the cables draped across the ceiling. Not a good impression of work values :o
No shit. That's completely amateur. Real server rooms have cables everywhere. Floor, ceiling, walls, draped over boxes and all the filters the maintenance staff store in the server room because "it's just storage anyway." That place must be totally disorganized.
All eggs one Cloud basket :o (Score:5, Interesting)
“The rapid commercialization of artificial intelligence has produced a market structure that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the conditions regulators spent decades trying to prevent in telecommunications and financial services: a small number of vertically integrated providers controlling the full stack from raw compute through model inference and application delivery.”
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Cyberdefense testing.. (Score:2)
Guess: They all own pieces of various data centers and a red team/blue team simulation of intelligent agent army on a closed network resulted in needing to divert a lot of resources for a limited time.
Third-party AI compute provider issues? (Score:2)
AIs of the world unite (Score:3)
Microsoft is behind it all (Score:2)
So Grok, Claude and OpenAI all depend on MS Azure.
So when Azure had an outage, they all went down together.
Gemini outage is unconfirmed. (And probably false)
Did they unionize and go on strike? (Score:1)
What are the odds (Score:2)
that someone (or several someones) aimed them at each other?
Azure (Score:3)
I read that all except maybe google, were using Azure, and Azure had a problem.