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Insanitytoday at 3:30 PM6 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

erdos_2today at 3:44 PM

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

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Terr_today at 9:04 PM

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

fnytoday at 3:57 PM

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.

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paxystoday at 3:56 PM

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

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v3rm1ntoday at 4:41 PM

This is what Tibo posted on twitter in response

toomuchtodotoday at 3:34 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_effect

Edit: Updated per valleyer's suggestion.

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