It’s probably the thing that everyone thinks it is. OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceXAI are all routed through something that we’re not supposed to know exists and that thing had a whoopsie.
The stuff in there is horrifying, and incredibly cute compared to what's possible now. The bottleneck back then would have been analysis, trivial now.
Everyone in the world, especially our leaders, sit under a colossal, omniscient blackmail machine. I don't believe democracy can exist under these conditions.
Even if it isn't precisely this, the fact that no one is saying anything is quite surprising.
Edit: I don't want do contribute to FUD, so want to call out this comment and its replies that identify the shared layer as probably being xAI's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568622
Gemini, too.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/four-major-ai-models-suff...
Or did a couple of companies with poor uptime records happen to have overlapping downtime?
Occam's Razor heavily, heavily points us towards the latter.
If anything, Occam's Razor would point to a common denominator with all of them, given it wasn't network-wide, as far as i know.
> All of these endpoints use existing providers with decades-long history at this point
That is just factually inaccurate. Their data centers aren't old and they lease a lot of compute from companies that didn't exist 5 years ago.
They all transit the same wires as all other traffic. Copy them at any regional bottleneck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A. Additionally, i'd admit that maybe someone(s) at these companies knows. But if we think there isn't any person who would agree to do this then I think we're being naive.
> Their data centers aren't old and they lease a lot of compute...
Again, they transit the same wires as everyone else. Here i'll also add that these companies have been actively courting government relationships (and Anthropic attempting to repair damaged ones), why would they stand on principles here and not any of the other many frontlines they've visibly acquiesced?
I just think it's easier to re-route their traffic than, as you say, touch every single datacenter and its employees in some way.
Oh, is that all?
> Again, they transit the same wires as everyone else
Which shared wires does Google's traffic go across? Do they share that network with others or do they not function as a Tier 1 network? How about Amazon? And the NSA is doing deep packet inspection of all the traffic going to these places to pull out the data they are interested in? What systems allow them to do this at the scale that would be necessary to accomplish this task? Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have their models hosted and provided by these and other Internet giants. So you now have to be able to somehow also get access to every "regional bottleneck" that those places have. Google has 40+ regions alone, as does Amazon. And each of these regions don't just have a single point of inbound/outbound traffic, so now you're over 200-300 points of interception that you would need just to grab the data you're suggesting they are.
And that's just the start of it. When I use Vertex or the Bedrock, my AI API requests from my instances doesn't leave their networks. So where does that traffic get intercepted?
> I just think it's easier to re-route their traffic than, as you say, touch every single datacenter and its employees in some way.
That would be really, really loud and really obvious. Messing with routes like that is very easily detectable.
Or, maybe, they don't care about this traffic at all and doing all of the huge amount of work necessary to accomplish what you're proposing isn't worth 0.1% of the effort it would require.
If the government needs the chat messages, the companies are already saving them. They can just request them through a variety of legal means. None of this vast conspiracy nonsense is needed. Just a couple lawyers and a willing judge. The NSA stopped their collection of phone metadata because they can just request what they need from the telecoms directly.
It is not often the Executives or Legal even know, but sometimes they did. AT&T bent over backwards to help.
This is standard behavior by the CIA and NSA, and has been for a long time.
https://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-documents-suggest-clo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-ns...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/19/us-tech-giants...
https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...
This whole thing makes me thing about a passage in Dune where they mentioned the Spacing Guild transported entire fleets of ships in isolated compartments and leaving said compartments was a capital offense. This way, entire militaries of mortal enemies were shipped to battlefield, with nothing but bulkheads separating each other.
How could anyone wage war like this? The defenders will always outnumber the attackers.
Still leaves me questioning how anyone could wage war. If the Harkonens could barely afford it, nobody can.
Also wondering if the Guild charges different rates for goods vs military. What is worth the brutal intergalactic shipping prices that you would not develop local industry to create it? Surely nobody is moving grain or ore, yet the Guild ships are portrayed as comically massive.
The guild would not allow any action to jeopardize the flow of spice. Thus any attack on Dune is implicitly sanctioned, notwithstanding their spice trade with the Fremen.
This playbook has only flipped due to a lot of cheap tech (and the machinery to make them) coming in uncotrollably to these countries has put them on a much more equal playing field.
Since the Guild controls what comes in, they can avoid this scenario from happening. They can control who can have what, and who can make what. Which I think is one of the true, deep explanations of why military tech in Dune is so weird and inefficient - essentially the efficiency and power of a weapon is dictated by how much the Guild charges for shipping them if they allow you to, at all. Which is how you end up with dudes with swords. It gives an idea of the level of technology in the universe that you can equip said dude with a nigh-impenetrable shield that fits in a belt buckle. I guess that's the result of optimizing for Guild transit fees, not real-world power.
Really it's not exactly a novel idea, but as I think more about it, it's uncanny how Dune (at least initially) is basically the fantasy Suez crisis and what followed. It explores the power dynamics very well, how factions can hold humanity hostage without firing a single shot, and how what they don't bother controlling comes to bite them in the ass.
> How could anyone wage war like this? The defenders will always outnumber the attackers.
Which is exactly what ends up happening, but it does take a bunch of extraordinary events.
No need. They simply cut off the offending faction from all space travel.
And is anyone keeping a table of correlations between outages? Sounds like valuable data.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-report...
Having a magical cert doesn't mean you can just intercept everything.
No mainstream browser (or any browser?) is doing cert pinning.
What "other methods" are there that are deployed and actually in use?
On September 17, 1991, management failure, power equipment failure, and human error combined to disable AT&T's central office switch at 33 Thomas. More than five million calls were blocked, and the Federal Aviation Administration private lines were also interrupted, disrupting air traffic control to 398 airports serving most of the northeastern United States.
They still do, but they used to, too.