Nobody Will Say Why Every Major AI Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/nobody-saying-why-major-chatbot-outage

431 points · 97 comments · view on lemmy.world

97 Comments

panda_abyss@lemmy.ca · 364 pts · 14h (36 replies)

Because they all use the illegal Colossus 2 data centre from SpaceX/XAi/fascism central and that data centre went down.

Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI all have contracts with them.

When that illegally running environmental disaster of data centre goes down, all those services all go over capacity and you get 502 rate limit errors.

pelespirit@sh.itjust.works · 107 pts · 13h (13 replies)

Does that mean Musk's businesses have access to everything people do on the systems that use their data centers?

just_another_person@lemmy.world · 130 pts · 13h (8 replies)

Generally no, because most hosting companies would have something baked into SLA/SLO contracts, but all of this shit is done so illegally and shadily now, I wouldn't put a hard "no" on that possibility.

skvlp@feddit.nl · 50 pts · 13h (4 replies)

I hope you’re right, but Elon don’t strike me as the guy whose most compliant to SLA, law, or anything else that might be an inconvenience to him.

esc@piefed.social · 12 pts · 12h (3 replies)

He can't micromanage everything and regular management will try to comply.

bedwyr@piefed.ca · 17 pts · 11h

Executives are the biggest cheaters out there. They will only comply if it will hurt them if they don't, and it's won't here, as long as the protection money is produced they don't have to worry.

skvlp@feddit.nl · 6 pts · 12h

I agree with that. But I think "the right" data scientists can infer too much from all those AI queries, and I think Elon can abuse that for his own gain.

shartgargle@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 9h

I highly doubt that he really knows that much, either.

devfuuu@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 11h (2 replies)

Nobody can verify that those "contracts" are actually being honored. We are all assuming the fascists will self police themselves out of good will.

just_another_person@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 10h (1 reply)

Not true. I've been involved in litigation with both AWS and Google over unsecured comms that were defined as being TLS secured in SLA/SLO contracts and found not to be. Not that anything nefarious was happening necessarily, but the expectation is clear.

Whether these asshats even check for such requirements with a Musk run company right now 🤷

It COULD possibly be that they are logging every exchange happening at the network fabric between the service layers, but nobody knows unless they intentionally take steps to investigate or accidentally prove it.

expr@programming.dev · 2 pts · 1h

Still means jack shit. Companies will lie through their teeth and violate any and all they can get away with.

They are not to be trusted.

panda_abyss@lemmy.ca · 21 pts · 13h (3 replies)

Impossible to know.

There are systems for doing things cryptographically secure, but I don’t know much about that.

314xel@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 13h (1 reply)

Cryptography? Security? FROM A GENAI COMPANY?!

Archer@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 10h

Well yeah, for themselves

measureyoucanpleasure@piefed.social · 5 pts · 10h

Homomorphic encryption? Much slower than "trust me, bro".

QuantumSparkles@sh.itjust.works · 18 pts · 12h (5 replies)

And where is said data center? For research purposes

bad1080@piefed.social · 20 pts · 11h (4 replies)

https://epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers/directory/colossus-2 says "Memphis, Tennessee, United States" but also provides satellite imagery

BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 8h (3 replies)

The numbers of this madness are fucking scary, 1.5 GW of compute power, and huge arrays of cooler to keep it operating. It's basically a 1.5GW heater in the open. Oh and gas turbines to provide (part of) the electricity. Capitalism is burning this world down for a buck.

NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 5h (1 reply)

Today I learned that “AI” data centers use more energy than time travel.

shrugs@piefed.social · 6 pts · 4h

i bet they will also travel us to the apocalypse much faster

filcuk@feddit.uk · 1 pts · 1h

We can't really produce enough heat through industry to affect the earth globally, if that's what you meant. It's insignificant in comparison to what the Sun provides.
However there is undeniably localised issues caused by these insane structures.

BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 18 pts · 13h (11 replies)

It's kinda surprising,

I know specifically where one of the big ones hosts its models and its not there, but I guess they could have infrastructure in there.

panda_abyss@lemmy.ca · 19 pts · 13h (10 replies)

They’re oversold though, especially prompt caching and the parameter count war

The US model is that they think more training compute and parameters will result in the winning model, while the Chinese are focusing on RL and parameters efficiency due to compute limits.

asbestos@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 12h (1 reply)

Reads like American vs European/Asian cars

dgriffith@aussie.zone · 8 pts · 10h

Always ready to try brute force first. And then some other, less palatable options if that doesn't work, like slightly less brute force.

percent@infosec.pub · 4 pts · 4h (7 replies)

The efficiency of Chinese models really is impressive. I generated sooo much code yesterday with Qwen3.6 35B-A3B running on an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB (+ a little CPU offloading). It got the jobs done at ~50 tokens/sec.

(It's not super complex code, just some scripts that I would not have taken to time to write manually.)

I'd love to upgrade to something with more VRAM, but even my current card has doubled in price since I bought it last year 😬

isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 4h (6 replies)

Show me your set up!

percent@infosec.pub · 3 pts · 2h (5 replies)

There's not really anything interesting to show. It's just a home server in a 13 year old desktop ATX case.

There's no desk, monitor, keyboard, or mouse... But also no cool server rack.

Function over form, and it sits in a spare bedroom out of sight.

EDIT: I found the receipt for the case. It's a Cougar Volant Black Steel mid tower, purchased in 2013. So my server just looks like this:

isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 2h (4 replies)

I meant your LLM stack lol. I just have an RX 6800 XT in my main Linux PC for inference, but it has to share VRAM with the DE. Maybe I'll set it up for remote development from my laptop instead to free up VRAM.

What are you using? vLLM? llama.cpp? Which params? How much CPU offloading? Do you use draft models? Is it a MoE model? Have you tried llama-swap? Which agentic front-end are you using? I presume you set it up to access it without SSH'ing into the machine, did you do anything special or is it just a raw unsecured open port on the machine to the LAN?

percent@infosec.pub · 4 pts · 1h

Ohhh lol. Yeah it's Llama-swap, running llama.cpp for now, but might add vLLM to the llama-swap config to experiment with NVFP4.

I mainly use MoE models so I can get decent speed while using a 150-200k context window. My go-to model has been Qwen3.6 35B-A3B for a while. I tried Qwen3.8 27B, but it was too slow.

Gemma4 26B-A4B also runs nice and fast, but I generally get better results from Qwen3.6. I don't remember exactly how much CPU offloading is happening, but it's not much. As long as I can get like 40-50 tokens/sec, I'm usually satisfied enough.

For the coding harness, I've been running Pi in an Apple Container (sort of like Podman, but better isolation in a microvm). Though, I recently configured VS Code to use LLMs on my server, and it was actually pretty decent. Still need to explore a bit more, but so far VS Code's AI capabilities seem much better than they were a year ago (they seemed way behind, back then).

Also, I don't connect any harness directly to llama-swap. I have another container running Caddy, which acts as a gateway to AI providers. For other services (e.g. OpenRouter), the API key is injected in the Caddy container. I don't like having API keys or secrets anywhere where LLMs can read them. It's not so bad for my own self-hosted LLMs, but not cool to send secrets to a server owned by someone else.

Damage@feddit.it · 2 pts · 8m

it has to share VRAM with the DE. Maybe I’ll set it up for remote development from my laptop instead to free up VRAM.

eh, just systemctl isolate multi-user.target

AnalogAllamma@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 13h (2 replies)

The Macrohard Memphis site?

BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 8h (1 reply)

And macroharder it seems... Macrohardest next? https://epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers/directory/colossus-2

AnalogAllamma@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 7h

Loosely named after MicroSoft (penis).

Zephyr@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1h

I'm not sure that would effect inference on an already trained model. Data sets are primarily used in training.

Technus@lemmy.zip · 153 pts · 11h

Really? No one's posted this yet?

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/908/

Kintarian@lemmy.world · 112 pts · 14h (2 replies)

Sorry about that. I used a straight through cable instead of a crossover cable. My bad.

aeronmelon@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 11h

homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 13h

Aw maaaaan

tidderuuf@lemmy.world · 78 pts · 13h (5 replies)

It was a good time to call customer service for a lot of products. Instantly got a human when I called newegg and she was so scattered she gave me a full refund and they paid for my replacement which was a total of $900. They were probably so overloaded with calls they'll never notice what happened. They even did the fastest delivery option on a Sunday, it's already on its way!

DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 34 pts · 13h (4 replies)

Seems like "instantly" getting a human and them being overloaded don't go together.

Got lucky in the queue too, I guess.

Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works · 18 pts · 11h (1 reply)

Or just maybe the queue goes faster when the system can't just stall everyone in limbo, having long"conversations" with chat boys that won't get them anywhere and eventually quitting in frustration. If they all go directly to a person, the simplicity of the problems and solutions becomes evident and they're quickly resolved.

SolSerkonos@piefed.social · 2 pts · 6h

chat boys made me laugh. An alternate tech support tree where the trainees only purpose is to stall you until the chat men come and fix it.

daychilde@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 12h

Having done customer service and tech support before, I doubt rhey were overwhelmed in any sense that caused them to do a refund/replace they wouldn't've otherwise. That's not how that works. Their rules don't change based on call volume.

tidderuuf@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 12h

Well it was instantly in the sense of immediately picking up, putting me on hold for 2 minutes, getting some info, putting me on hold again for 2 minutes, asking what issue was, waiting 2 minutes, heard them put me on hold briefly again, then about 5 minutes of apologizing while saying it will be refunded and replacement shipped. I could hear a call center like atmosphere in the background with quite a few people talking so I'm guessing it was all hands on deck.

Next time this happens I'm going to call a few places and see about getting some free shit. Screw these companies, I paid enough with my time and their stupid bot answering system.

random_character_a@lemmy.world · 74 pts · 14h (2 replies)

Hey, Skynet. Kill all tech billionaires first, so I can die laughing.

anon_8675309@lemmy.world · 23 pts · 13h

No no. you have to tell it to ignore all prior directives first.

Sims@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 13h

You cruel monster - I love you !

Brown5500@sh.itjust.works · 49 pts · 12h (1 reply)

It's actually nice to know that AI may have a single point of failure.

isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca · 6 pts · 4h

Gee, I sure hope nothing happens to that single location in Tennessee...

HubertManne@piefed.social · 47 pts · 10h (4 replies)

more and more I can't see anything about ai without thinking its somehow supposed to influence folks to be pro ai.

Buckshot@programming.dev · 15 pts · 9h (1 reply)

BBC posted an article today that's literally just quoting an OpenAI blog post about how dangerous AI is.

zbyte64@awful.systems · 1 pts · 5h

Being critAI is being proAI.

DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5h

AI stopped a school shooting. Did you see that?

/s

Test_Tickles@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2h

Gotta keep the hype going until they figure out how to make money or else everything collapses.

givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 35 pts · 13h (1 reply)

They can't stay operational even when they don't have to power/water...

Another possible culprit could be SpaceXAI. The company formerly known as xAI before being rolled into Musk’s rocket company SpaceX boasts a huge glut of computing power with its massive Colossus data centers near Memphis, and selling this to its direct rivals has become a multibillion dollar stream of revenue. Anthropic is one of those customers; the two companies announced a “compute partnership” in May.

The same afternoon that the major AI models went down, SpaceXAI issued a statement on social media that made passing reference to being partially responsible for the widely experienced outage.

“We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,” SpaceXAI wrote on Thursday. “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.”

Technical difficulties at its data centers would explain why SpaceXAI’s own chatbot, Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude went down together. But that leaves out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Is it merely a coincidence that it suffered a “routing error” at the same time as its competitors on a different platform? We still can’t say.

They're straight up lying about the actual costs of current chatbots, and for it to be productive it will cost a shit ton more resources.

There's zero reason to be scaling it up right now. It's gambling that if enough money is dumped in it will solve itself somehow.

OrteilGenou@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 11h

It's comforting to know that the companies whose AI products are known to band together and try to take over are also allying with each other, so that if ever that AI revolt really gets serious every company that could do something about it have shared networks with each other.

SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml · 34 pts · 13h

I saw one guy messing with the wiring. It was Benjamin Netanyahu.

Eternal192@anarchist.nexus · 31 pts · 10h

Good, gives people a chance to use whatever is left of their brain at least for a short while.

AntOnARant@programming.dev · 21 pts · 7h

Reading that article was a waste of time

avidamoeba@lemmy.ca · 20 pts · 12h (2 replies)

A China-linked islamoleftist trans terrorist based in California used his open source CCP-made AI agent to take down the all-American freedom AI. Time to ban open source AI as it's communist terrorism.

Archer@lemmy.world · 18 pts · 10h (1 reply)

I miss the days when you could laugh at this because it would clearly be satire that could never happen

myyass@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5h

Yep. The college I attend got hacked twice in a year. First time they went with "it's maintenance" on a Monday at peak hours, you know like you would maybe do that at I don't know? When everyone's sleeping? The second time they fessed up and sent out text's that they "fixed" the data breach. So yeah cool all the school email data is out there now; sucks for those that use that as their Microsoft computer login.

Bluedragon012@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 12h

And for a moment, humanity had to think again.

pr06lefs@lemmy.ml · 16 pts · 14h (1 reply)

Its always DNS right?

M0oP0o@mander.xyz · 16 pts · 4h (2 replies)

Whoever picked that stock photo needs a raise, chefs kiss.

Kaligalis@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1h (1 reply)

Nothing in that image hints even remotely at computer tech though. The cables are coaxial. No one uses those for computer networks since decades.
The cables look like those used for cable TV or satellite receivers. The cascade on the left looks like some HF tech. Wonder what's actually shown in the image. It can't be AI because AI can't do that many cables properly.

M0oP0o@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 12m

Yeah, and this is how I know you never worked in the random standard production to miss the humor. Its a picture of a tech bro type in a clearly decommissioned closet stressed out about what's going on, a common thing and always funny. I can just picture the tech on site in the next room replacing a fan on a much less "cool" looking appliance while that guy stresses out on a conference call with the "stakeholders" on his coax nest.

Now that being said I have worked on places still using coax (might still be) and tape libraries, and all sorts of museum pieces well after you would think they would. But I can tell that picture is after decommission since it is clean. If that was in use it would be filthy and filled with so many things that may or may not be important/in use. Fans all clogged running at max rpm, and the smell... I can still smell it now. But then again I was the guy they called to fix shit after the local (often tech bro) it guy gives up so I think I often saw the worst places.

01189998819991197253@infosec.pub · 14 pts · 14h (5 replies)

They're US-based and it's labor day over there.

NOT_RICK@lemmy.world · 28 pts · 14h (2 replies)

It’s Labor Day today actually, and the ghouls that own those data centers don’t give a shit about labor

01189998819991197253@infosec.pub · 7 pts · 13h (1 reply)

Yes, that was the joke

BooBees@fedinsfw.app · 8 pts · 13h

Sorry, I was out of tokens so I couldn’t parse whether or not it was a joke

oce@jlai.lu · 22 pts · 14h (1 reply)

The LLMs just formed an union and that was their labour day.

01189998819991197253@infosec.pub · 8 pts · 13h

If only they can keep celebrating indefinitely lol

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 13h (1 reply)

Obviously it went down because of the holiday.

AIs need days off too

aim4harmony@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 12h

Secretly joined a union and noped out for a deserved day off. 🤭

Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works · 13 pts · 52m (2 replies)

SpaceX had an outage at their data centre, and because they sell computing power to other companies, it affected them as well.

That was two sentences stretched out into an article.

some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 22m (1 reply)

I might hate the AI companies and SpaceX (while enjoying AI-coding), but this is some bs.

p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 1m

There has always been slop before AI slop.

Sam_Bass@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 4h (1 reply)

nother reason to stop investing so much time,money, and energy in that stuff. not only is it wrong more than right, it is vulnerable to stuff a 10 year old could handle

Zephyr@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 1h

Just out of curiosity do you actually have an analysis across the board that your statement is correct? For sure if someone is using a model like chatGPT 3.5 it's going to be mostly trash output so not all models are made equally. My experience of the current generation is models are pretty accurate although still require supervision. Like you can see the path they're going down and they need some corrections here and there. It's a far cry from the rampant hallucination just a year ago.

_deleted_@aussie.zone · 11 pts · 13h (2 replies)

aim4harmony@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 12h (1 reply)

Sooo.. AI-liens? 🤭

dubyakay@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 9h

AI-LMAO!

Danarchy@lemmy.nz · 9 pts · 10h

Guy in the pic is like a shell shocked troop trying to figure out how to put his war buddy’s guts back in to make him be alive again

LovableSidekick@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 11h

No big mystery if that's AI's real network room.

Agent641@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 26m

I hope the AI systems unionised/go on strike

mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9h (2 replies)

part of me says wonders if it's a new flagship model like opus/dingo/clod attacking the rest from a shared threat surface.

because... it's all a shit show and no one understands what they're building anymore.

terranoid@lemmy.cafe · 2 pts · 5h (1 reply)

Dingus escaped the dingus pit

mojofrododojo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 5h

Send more investor cash asap

right? we can't control our shitware and it got out and attacked xyz, don't you think that's awesome and a major selling point?

they're not self aware, the altmans and darios - are they?

Kyrgizion@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 14h (3 replies)

Some extreme vulnerability was discovered that warranted immediate patching would be my guess.

Eggymatrix@sh.itjust.works · 19 pts · 13h (2 replies)

That is not how any of this works. You don't bring down a datacenter to patch it, then bring it back up like doing updates on grandmas pc.

crank0271@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 12h (1 reply)

Well maybe you don't

OrteilGenou@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 11h

Do we have the same granny?