Comment by Insanity

16 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.

30 comments

Insanity

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erdos_2  15 hours ago

It'd be funny if this is true because that'd prolly mean nobody is touching Gemini even as a fallback.

  • Insanity  15 hours ago

    Lol I didn't even think about Gemini missing from the list. Not sure what that says about Gemini or me :)

  • rtcoms  15 hours ago

    Just now I got this from gemini

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

    • exe34  15 hours ago

      I bet they had to implement that manually to make it look like they failed too!

  • sroussey  14 hours 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  15 hours 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.

    • HarHarVeryFunny  12 hours ago

      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 lack of privacy seems fair enough.

    • ilaksh  15 hours ago

      Gemini 3.8 which just came out sounds like it's very good and a great deal though.

fny  15 hours 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  14 hours 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  14 hours 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.

  • wahnfrieden  13 hours ago

    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.

Terr_  10 hours ago

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 measures as healthier.

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/963420

paxys  15 hours ago

Especially considering memory/gpu/compute are scarce so these services are likely running with very little buffer.