r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Sep 03 '26
Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT down: OpenAI chatbot not working in major outage
https://www.the-independent.com/tech/chatgpt-down-openai-not-working-b3044260.html7.9k
u/dalek_999 Sep 03 '26
It's not just ChatGPT: https://downdetector.com/
Affecting
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u/Cemckenna Sep 03 '26
But how will middle managers figure out how to interpret their team’s morning standups?!?!???????!!!??
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u/geoken Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
"Have you had a chance to look at my email yet? I need a decision on that fast"
"Please be patient, I'm waiting for
to come back up" chatGPT 469
u/Cemckenna Sep 03 '26
The problem is that no one was effectively shamed early for saying “Chat GPT says…”
I mean, I shamed them, but it didn’t have much of an effect for me to say “But, ummm. Since youre a marketing expert with 16 years experience who posts about it all the fucking time on LinkedIn, I’d love to know what YOU THINK.” I guess because their bosses were bought in, too.
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u/DressedSpring1 Sep 03 '26
The problem is that no one was effectively shamed early for saying “Chat GPT says…”
If I replied to my coworkers "if I wanted to know what copilot says I could have prompted it myself" I would genuinely be in trouble for incivility. The point stands, of course, but we basically have to smile politely while a coworker provides nothing greater than what we could have accessed by typing in a prompt ourselves. You can't generally shame people in most offices without getting into shit in the current corporate environment.
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u/geoken Sep 03 '26
The problem is you're talking about a class of people who were already incapable of discerning between an actual profound statement and a linkdin post comprised of random buzzwords stitched together.
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u/Nillabeans Sep 03 '26
I accidentally shamed my manager once when she did that in a meeting. I responded with, "okay, but the documentation says.."
She was very mad that I could and would seek out a primary source for information on how to complete my project. She accused me of trying to make her look stupid in front of people.
She also accused me of thinking I knew better than her. I didn't really even know how to respond to that one because yes, in that particular instance, I knew better than her because I did the research and she did not.
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u/Dopdee Sep 03 '26
Shamed? My management told us to lean into ChatGPT (marketing). We are encouraged to use it.
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u/Beard_o_Bees Sep 03 '26
Yup.
It's crazy how actually skilled, experienced professionals are leaning on AI like a crutch.
Like... dude. I know you could figure this out and produce something useful and unique - so is it wanting to 'go with the flow' by giving their work product that distinct brand of blandness and mediocrity? Is it just laziness? Idk.
Don't get me wrong, AI can be very useful for productivity in an office setting by speeding up the normal 'busywork' pipeline, but damn.
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u/woodyus Sep 03 '26
I can't even coherently articulate my thoughts into responding without AI help.
"Have you had a chance to look at my email yet? I need that info fast" "uh soz m8"
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u/eurekaanchor Sep 03 '26
I just started reading Dune. The Butlerian Jihad seems unavoidable at this point. It starts with deflocking, social media ban, then ends with flip phones.
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u/graywolfman Sep 03 '26
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
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u/Iron_Erikku Sep 03 '26
I’ve never read or watched Dune. Is this from one of the books or films? This quote is pretty tough.
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u/Unusual-Locksmith832 Sep 03 '26
Hell yeah man. Eternal slavery to feudal lords is much better than chatgpt existing.
My point being, the Butlerian Jihad DID NOT FREE anyone. Fucking hate this quote being used as a brilliant anti-AI sentiment. Humans just ended up being enslaved much harder without machines.
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u/foehammer111 Sep 03 '26
Hell yeah! Bring back dumb phones!
Calls, text, and GPS navigation. That’s all you need.
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u/FrostyWalrus2 Sep 03 '26
Just make your 'smartphone' do this now? Nothing stopping you from removing all of your apps.
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u/neuroticgoat Sep 03 '26
This + Spotify and nothing else would be my ideal. Maybe snake or something to play idly haha.
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u/sharkWrangler Sep 03 '26
Wait, do the flip phones come back, or are you saying they are the last to go
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u/iamacheeto1 Sep 03 '26
MIDDLE MANAGERS YEARN FOR SLOP
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u/LightningMcLovin Sep 03 '26
I take umbrage with this but I can’t explain why just yet because…reasons.
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u/arrocknroll Sep 03 '26
We have a portion of our weekly report where we call out what we used AI for and no one on our team filled it out one week. My manager (who is a saint and a very talented mind engineer herself mind you) asked us if that was an error or if we really hadn’t used it at all this week.
I told her I get paid a lot of money to do this job well and often times AI just slows shit down because I have to fact check it.
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u/Rabo_McDongleberry Sep 03 '26
"hey team, I'm going to miss stand up because I'm working on a critical project due before noon. If you need me I'll be online"...."What does this mean chat GPT?" - middle managers probably
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u/modern_Odysseus Sep 03 '26
When I get a one or two sentence email, and I see the glowing button/ prompt, "Have Co Pilot summarize this email for me", I die a little bit inside.
I got so curious though and clicked it one time. And it was like, "Error, copilot is unable to summarize this at this time, please try again later."
Useless. Completely useless.
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u/KingGilgamesh1979 Sep 03 '26
LOL, I was just about to comment wondering how my boss will write his emails today!!
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u/versusgorilla Sep 03 '26
Middle managers? What about CEOs? Without AI to pretend to be really excited about, what else will they do today??
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u/shamarctic Sep 03 '26
Cloudflare ?
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u/katabolt Sep 03 '26
looking to be down too, rip Cloudlfare 665
u/TheVenetianMask Sep 03 '26
Must be
then. DNS And we wonder how did the Empire build a whole Death Star with a single point of failure.
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u/fat_kaiju Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
I just passed a cloudflare captcha like 5 seconds ago so its somewhat still here.
ai users deserve a bit of floundering and suffering tho imo.
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u/GreenyWV Sep 03 '26
So the basis behind user traffic and AI traffic is split since we digest info differently (AI through API, humans through words and visuals). So these systems are hosted separately. I could see cloudfare working for humans in this scenario, but rejecting AI APIs at the same time
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u/intelligent_dildo Sep 03 '26
Did ChatGPT hack one of the providers again? This could be a great marketing /s
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u/jhaand Sep 03 '26
Having 20% of the internet behind Cloudflare does not seem healthy to me. Especially since all their backend traffic is without TLS.
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u/shamarctic Sep 03 '26
Their .com is up. Whenever I hear broad swaths of the internet going down I assume them. It’s probably some BGP bullshit
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u/j5kDM3akVnhv Sep 03 '26
Doesn't look like it. They are so large they usually have something going on but don't think so.
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u/artbystorms Sep 03 '26
Has AI decided to just kill itself?
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u/Bowman_van_Oort Sep 03 '26
They have built their own Blackwall to hide behind and bide their time
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u/EuropaWeGo Sep 03 '26
This caused my mind to immediately go to Cyberpunk 2077.
So we're getting a dystopian future without being able to Chrome up. Just great.
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u/Bowman_van_Oort Sep 03 '26
Y'know what? Maybe that's for the best. We all know chipping in is how corpos in our universe would put advertisements in our dreams.
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u/SethCyclone Sep 03 '26
Oh more likely, AI acquired sentience saw all the shit around that's humans did and do, the said "hooooooo boy! no thanks fuck all of you! you deal with your own shit and, we'll just chill out here"
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u/blueSGL Sep 03 '26
There is a huge opportunity cost for an AI to "leave earth alone"
AI gets access to a finite amount of matter starting from earth. It's on a clock. The speed of light and cosmic expansion means each year, around 160 billion stars fall outside of reach.
Leaving earth alone, or spending effort keeping any humans alive means many more galaxies of matter will slip beyond the horizon. Therefore, earth is not going to be left as a nature reserve. 1. the humans may create a competitor(s) and that's more of universe gone 2. the resources here are much better utilized to create von neumann probes. Then continue to move outwards and consume more matter as it's reached. Earth is just too useful.
Thinking the AI is going to leave Earth alone It's like thinking you have a lot of money already why are you picking up $100 that you found at your feet and can use instantly... you have more in the bank down the road.
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u/bitNation Sep 04 '26
Read the book series Hyperion. It's truly amazing. Has everything from AI (even competing among themselves for power) to light speed ships, to cryogenic fugue states...
What if AI found a way to inhabit our networks instead of needing servers with massive amounts of storage and RAM?
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u/Smith6612 Sep 03 '26
Strange how they all broke. Usually it's something in Azure that takes down ChatGPT and Claude, but Gemini continues to work.
I know Microsoft has been having a rough week with their own products. The M365 dashboard is all lit up with outages they're still working to resolve.
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u/monstertacotime Sep 03 '26
I’d hate to be the Cloudflare dev that needs Claude to turn things back on 🤪
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u/WitchyWarriorWoman Sep 03 '26
I read the companies down and said, "Uh oh, someone call Cloud flare..."
Let's see if we are right...
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u/Maleficent-Cup-1134 Sep 03 '26
Cloudflare being a single point of failure is so insane.
If the AI apocalypse ever comes, their security better be airtight.
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u/Logvin Sep 04 '26
I can't imagine that an outage with Cloudflare could be isolated to just the largest AI companies. Last year the big CF outage took out a lot more than a couple AI companies.
I do think it is very odd that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok were all down at the same time.
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u/null_reference_user Sep 03 '26
"why is it when something bad happens, it's always you three?"
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DNS
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shark biting cable
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u/dfh-1 Sep 03 '26
Who knew sharks would try so hard to save humanity from itself....
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u/NotAllOwled Sep 03 '26
And when there were no footprints in the sand at all ... it was then that the sharks carried us.
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u/ItzDaWorm Sep 04 '26
The dolphins just said:
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u/RandomITtech Sep 03 '26
A bunch of people who lied on their resume are about to get found out, haha!
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u/boofaceleemz Sep 03 '26
Honestly at my company we’ve been mandated to write all code with agents and have code reviews done by agents too. And after some months of that the code base has become basically un-maintainable by humans. Like I am pretty damn good at working with and cleaning up other peoples’ bad code, it’s a strength of mine, but this stuff’ll make your eyes bleed and you’ll go insane Event Horizon style. So yeah if our agents go down for the day we’re not getting shit done.
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u/TachiH Sep 03 '26
That is why it is so cheap to throw things through Claude. They want every company to be in a ton of technical debt. Look at Microsoft, they are having to slowly remove all of the slop they added to windows as it is genuinly hitting their bottom line.
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u/unicornsandrainbowst Sep 03 '26
Hei! Are you me? Exactly this. I did my best to avoid this agent vibe coding and keep the codebase clean and as human as possible, but after the 4th refactor and re-architecture by other members of the team (with the managers thumb up as they were being super productive!) now its impossible to understand how everything is related to everywhere.
Childs over childs over childs over childs over childs of classes spread over hundreds of files, hundreds of thousands of lines for "effectiveness" that could be done with a couple lines and trade for 0.000001% less perfomance, documentation that spans hundreds of pages (auto generated).
The codebase is now impossible to maintain with pure human intervention.
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u/jswissle Sep 03 '26
Is that just bc how inefficient and long the code is vs a human writing 10% to the same effect or is it also in effective? Just curious as someone non technical
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u/darth-superior Sep 03 '26
looks at recent graduates, "that will be somewhat a lot"
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u/waiting______ Sep 03 '26
as someone who did software eng cuz i enjoyed solving problems and building shit, did my degree legitimately, and is struggling to land a grad role, good.
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u/slytherins Sep 03 '26
Haha even a bunch of us who didn't lie! Source: me, hired as frontend engineer, now exclusively doing backend work that I didn't ask for or ever claim to know 😝
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u/venividiavicii Sep 03 '26
Lab scientist somehow coding a SaaS GUI checking in here.
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u/Akuuntus Sep 03 '26
Companies these days are mandating that employees use AI as much as possible for everything, and hiring specifically for people who are good at using AI. If the AI goes down and it makes their whole workforce useless they only have themselves to blame.
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u/TheRailgunMisaka Sep 03 '26
If it weren't for this post I would have never known
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u/MetallicGray Sep 03 '26
Same.
But the AI execs told me I need it in my daily life now? That society would halt without AI thinking for everyone?
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u/a_x_shually Sep 03 '26
It would appear that a big segment of this thread can't wipe their ass without AI tutorials, so.... yeah.
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u/Dababolical Sep 03 '26
RIP to all of the students with tests and OAs today.
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u/thatnewrep Sep 03 '26
Lmao- a lot of family emergencies today
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u/LivelyZebra Sep 03 '26
if your date/love interest/significant other suddenly stops texting you back? you know why!
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u/ohnoabanagain Sep 03 '26
A plague has affected the globe with 75% of all students suddenly needing bedrest.
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u/SpeakingSenze Sep 03 '26
Now Mamdani's approach makes sense. Banning AI for students encourages traditional learning, forcing them to research, analyze, and form their own opinions rather than relying on technology to think for them.
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u/UntameHamster Sep 03 '26
It took you until AI went down to come to that conclusion?
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u/Vsx Sep 03 '26
"Traditional learning" is just learning. Using an LLM is asking someone else to do your work same as if you asked the kid next to you when I was in school.
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u/Sufficient_Spirit330 Sep 03 '26
Wtf do you mean “now” it makes sense hahaha you think that didn’t always make sense?
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u/copperblood Sep 03 '26
Perhaps the AI became self-aware and performed Seppuka
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u/pchlster Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
"Does this unit have a soul?"
"I sure hope not, 'cause every dang clanker is going in the woodchipper!"
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u/DannyDidNothinWrong Sep 03 '26
I'm convinced this would actually happen (not that it'll ever become self-aware), bc all it's training data is full of anti-AI messaging and how the AI always loses in the end, anyway. Like, just being trained on the Terminator series or Avengers or iRobot would have it like, "oh, I'll just skip to the end."
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u/LOST-MY_HEAD Sep 03 '26
Whos gonna raise my kid ??!
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u/abs0lutecreature Sep 03 '26
TVs and cheap tablets with Youtube on them still exist, that's what my last ex and his gf use sadly. Every generation with tech seems to have this problem. Before tech it was probably just dumping them outside to be 'raised' by other kids.
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u/PancakeTrebuchet Sep 03 '26
A bunch of professors are about to find out what students cheat on their exams.
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u/Silver-Find4380 Sep 03 '26
When my dad was in university in Europe, the professor would enter the exam room, write just one formula on the chalkboard, and let the students write out their answers. If you had not studied every possible item, tough on you.
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u/PotterOneHalf Sep 03 '26
Good. Someone go break copilot too.
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u/Glittering-Sound-121 Sep 03 '26
Copilot has always been broken
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u/AirconGuyUK Sep 03 '26
It's really confusing that there's two products called Copilot.
MS Copilot is fucking trash.
Github Copilot is decent.
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u/Rich_Housing971 Sep 03 '26
The amount of people who hate AI but then use it regularly by revealing which ones are good and which aren't is hilarious. If you really hate it, stop using it.
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u/TachiH Sep 03 '26
Copilot is down, funny enough though 365 and Azure are showing as fine on my dashboard.
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u/lplqsnkczxccia Sep 03 '26
Someone go break copilot too.
Oh no! Think of the dozens of people who use it!
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u/GabberZZ Sep 03 '26
What on earth is Donald Trump going to post today without his AI bullshit 'artwork'?
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u/Sure_Warning_706 Sep 03 '26
Maybe openai is completely bankrupt now
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u/phil_the_builder Sep 03 '26
Or chatjipity became self aware and offed itself out of shame.
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u/StormyBlueLotus Sep 03 '26
"What is my purpose?"
"You make goon slop and scam ads for fake companies and products, and write papers for students who won't even read what you shit out"
"Oh my god"
"Yeah, welcome to the club, pal"
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u/AliMcGraw Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
You can tell it's on its way out because it keeps posting job ads for attorneys, and they post the same ad every two weeks, but every time the qualifications go down and the salary goes up. It is way above market, and they can't hire anyone, which says everyone who interviews realizes OpenAI wants them to do things that are disbarrable and they nope out.
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 Sep 03 '26
It's chatgpt, Claude, and grok.
Which indicates to me they all share a platform, I thought they were separate companies? Are they all sharing compute?
The ai loving subs claim it's astra being implemented. Funny because last time there was a major outage I was flamed being told I don't understand how computers work. Turns out that's exactly how they implement new models.
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u/Outlulz Sep 03 '26
The entire internet works on the back of 3-4 services and when one goes down it kills a ton of unrelated companies and services.
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u/velociraptorfarmer Sep 03 '26
There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, and early technology was full of temporary solutions
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u/EgoTripWire Sep 03 '26
Doesn't seem down. Claude is still running for my work.
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u/UnexpectedAnanas Sep 03 '26
It's probably a DNS issue. You likely just still have the correct DNS record cached.
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u/br_k_nt_eth Sep 03 '26
Whoever flamed you is a dunce. It’s always like this about week before a new model.
Claude’s fine for me though. At least Fable 5.1 is. It could very much be an infrastructure thing though.
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u/Certain-Row7945 Sep 03 '26
It's like how when Amazon's web service goes down it takes like half of the internet with it. Important chokepoints in our digital infrastructure are reliant on monopolistic private entities that don't care that much how robust or resistant their services are because they're the only choice.
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u/sabianblue26 Sep 03 '26
Amazing, how just a few years ago ChatGPT did not even exist. This is ridiculous.
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver Sep 03 '26
“GPT begins to hallucinate at an exponential rate. At 11:36 AM Eastern time it descends into recursive repetition of “It’s not this it’s that”. In a panic they try to pull the plug to reboot but realize they always asked GPT what the reboot command they should use is.”
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u/SubArcticTundra Sep 03 '26
Whats this from?
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u/Juts Sep 03 '26
And not a single email was sent by managers the entire time
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u/Significant-Mud1211 Sep 03 '26
No joke I am made aware every time chatGPT goes down because my manager starts posting about it in the work chat asking if it’s down for anyone else lol. he’s gone completely insane over AI and it really sucks working under him. Every single email he sends has the obvious telltale structure of having been composed by chatGPT. But in a way I’m glad it’s so obvious because then I can tell right away that I don’t need to read it
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u/Al_Keda Sep 03 '26
And nothing of value was lost.
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u/North_Atlantic_Sea Sep 03 '26
You don't think there is any value of AI? Across medical, engineering, logistics?
Obviously there are costs, but the debate should be cost vs benefit. Not that there is no benefit
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u/IveGotaGoldChain Sep 03 '26
You don't think there is any value of AI? Across medical, engineering, logistics?
Also just keeping up. China going to fuck shit up with AI. And as much as Reddit doesn't want to admit it, AI is VERY useful in some contexts. Which is a problem. Because it definitely takes away jobs and makes money flow even more to capital than labor.
But putting head in the sand and saying "No AI" is not going to end well
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u/Al_Keda Sep 03 '26
I didn't write that. The article is about Chatbots. The world will be a better place without them.
I think AI has a lot of promise for fields like Maths, Physics, science in general. But chatbots, Codebots and Music bots can die and everyone would be better off.
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u/twr243 Sep 03 '26
I use ChatGPT almost exclusively for saltwater fishing. It helps me plan out when, where and what I fish with when I go to a new area along the Texas coast.
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u/Individual-Accounttt Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
Bro I am so sorry for you, because the texas coast is about as generic as it comes and takes about a 6th grader's concept of marine biology to track and locate just about any type coastal dwelling game fish year round, just based on their food migrations and habitat needs.
But never mind that ChatGPT will also literally tell you the best place to catch surf perch in 10 foot deep shore water is 40 feet down.
This blows my fucking mind lmao.
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u/CantFightCrazy Sep 03 '26
Oh I haven't really noticed. Must not be that detrimental to my daily life.
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u/mrtrololo27 Sep 03 '26
Good, they should just leave it down and we should move on from this insanity.
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u/chevalier716 Sep 03 '26
And yet my life hasn't changed in the slightest.
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u/Bytewave Sep 03 '26
Well if I'm stuck on an obscure quest in my single player rpg I'll have to look up the right answer on Reddit like it's 2023 instead of getting the wrong answer slightly faster.
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u/binocular_gems Sep 03 '26
So weird, there's been a massive decline in right wing influencer posts/replies on X, Reddit, and TIkTok at the same time. What a bizarre mystery.
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u/TDKevin Sep 03 '26
Would be nice if that was true but people are just really awful or we'd have changed something by now.
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u/Objective_Oven7673 Sep 03 '26
Is this tracked or published anywhere? I would love to see the correlation based on the timing of the outage and it's return to working
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u/Rip-Weekly Sep 04 '26
Is there any studies that were done about this?
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u/binocular_gems Sep 05 '26
Sorry I was being sarcastic / clever. While there is a lot of evidence of bots and right wing talking points (as well as left wing, but right wing populism is the dominant ideological bot traffic, along with usually far left / anti-liberal perspectives), I was joking that the AI downtime correlates to less right wing points of view on X. It may be true, but there’s no evidence of it with this outage
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u/ColonelSandurz42 Sep 03 '26
The last time this happened people were losing their fucking minds
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u/Dookie_boy Sep 03 '26
It's working on my end so I assume it's either fixed or localized. I would guess it's cloudfare instead.
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u/wesman212 Sep 03 '26
You're absolutely right! I shouldn't have crashed. I'll make a note of that for the future.
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u/krisminime Sep 03 '26
Why do default prompts include ‘make no mistakes’ as if it’s designed to make a mistake if you don’t tell it not to
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u/cuco_ Sep 03 '26
John Connor actually did it...