4 ms·
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 t
by Chance-Device 1mo ago
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.
- cyanydeez 1mo agoamazon?
- mrnotcrazy 1mo agoCould you expand on this more? It's not clear to me what this is implying.
- cyberpunk 1mo agoThink snowden.
- strictnein 1mo agoSharepoint is the cause of the outages?
- ceejayoz 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- senordevnyc 1mo agoDoes the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?
- esafak 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
- ceejayoz 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- chews 1mo agoit's fair to say they do and have for ages... it's not that hard to assume a well trusted TLS cert is under their control.
- strictnein 1mo agoWhat does having a "well trusted TLS cert" enable for them in this case, exactly? Having a magical cert doesn't mean you can just intercept everything.
- odo1242 1mo agoOn the contrary, it lets you MITM encrypted communications by swapping the website's original certificate for the "well trusted TLS cert"
- strictnein 1mo agoNo, it doesn't. HSTS and other methods prevent this from happening.
- kelnos 1mo agoHSTS doesn't protect you from this at all. It only requires HTTPS, which a spoofed-but-trusted cert passes just fine. No mainstream browser (or any browser?) is doing cert pinning. What "other methods" are there that are deployed and actually in use?
- keeda 1mo agoTraffic doesn’t need to be routed through it though, just tee’d to it,
- arm32 1mo agoIn the context of arbitrary line-level traffic, sure. But we're talking about robust reverse proxies here if this _is_ what's going on, again, not a fiber tap inside a closet. In that case, there's no such thing as tee'ing to it.
- snowwrestler 1mo agoWorth mentioning that this room takes a split from the main feed and is not in the path of traffic. Whatever is in this room could go down and it would not cause an outage.
- novok 1mo agoAnd if the hypothetical splitter is the thing that breaks? Then it would break main traffic too.
- AlexandrB 1mo agoInterestingly, fiber signals can be split passively[1] (without a transducer), which should be extremely reliable. No idea what technology this kind of application would use though. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_splitter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_splitter
- novok 1mo agoWe don't know the architecture of this hypothetical spy splitter tho in the current case. It can be less covert and more of a complicated config, etc.
- snowwrestler 1mo agoHow often does the entire west coast of the U.S. lose Internet connectivity to the entire continent of Asia? That gives you a constraint on how often that type of failure actually occurs.
- jansan 1mo agoThere is No Such Thing
- chews 1mo agobeing done by No Such Agency.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- CringeHN2 1mo ago[flagged]
- itdaniher 1mo agoIt would be weird for the Mandatory NSA Logging Program to be synchronous with serving customer traffic, but-
- weare138 1mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...
- Der_Einzige 1mo agoThis is the building from Control and the fact that 1. it's a real building and 2. it's an actual spy building is even crazier to me: https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Oldest_House https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Oldest_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(video_game)
- weare138 1mo agoTo give you an idea just how much phone traffic was being routed through that building, they had a major power failure at that site and it took down most of the north eastern US's phone network: 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.
- StrangeClone 1mo agoFBI, open up!!
- SadErn 1mo agoYes, this would give the US gov: 1. A universal kill switch. 2. A way to monitor foreign AI usage.
- hightrix 1mo agoAnd for this admin especially, 3. A way to censor content they don’t like or alter responses to present the admin in a positive manner
- dgellow 1mo agoIt’s not really a secret that the US government already has both, they control ICANN and are monitoring traffic around the globe since decades
- chews 1mo agosomeone had to swap out the tape drive in Room 641A.
- senordevnyc 1mo agoWere there significant API outages too? I didn’t notice any on my production workflows, and I’d assume what you’re implying would cover API routes too, otherwise it seems kinda pointless.
- strictnein 1mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic have their systems in dozens of data centers, including using compute from the major cloud providers. Are you implying that all of these data centers (and many of their employees) are involved in helping the the US government secretly tap every single AI conversation by routing them through some unknown network/device? 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.
- forgetmypasswd 1mo ago[dead]
- usernomdeguerre 1mo agoWhat makes you think they'd need to touch every datacenter? All of these endpoints use existing providers with decades-long history at this point, and network monitoring is already a proven 'feature' of the agencies they'd need to co-exist with over their lifetimes. 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.
- strictnein 1mo agoExplain the system in which you could capture all of these chats with no knowledge of anyone in these data centers. How are they routed to this NSA system or through some NSA device when these companies' compute are spread over hundreds of data centers? > 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.
- usernomdeguerre 1mo ago>Explain the system in which you could capture all of these chats with no knowledge of anyone in these data centers. They all transit the same wires as all other traffic. Copy them at any regional bottleneck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A 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.
- otikik 1mo agoIt’s aliens
- mentalgear 1mo agoWouldn't be surprised: Snowden's revelations 10 plus years ago already showed how the NSA was injected into the data centers of Social Media, it's only logical that they would now demand to be injected into the biggest, most information providing data stream of the planet of the present: LLM services.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- specproc 1mo agoI read Nowhere to Hide recently, really worth it if you can get past Greenwald sticking himself in the middle (start halfway through). 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.
- eggnet 1mo agoIf it does exist, why would it work this way, and not the obvious way of streaming logs… which would not cause an outage if it failed.
- maxbond 1mo agoIf this hypothesis were true then a spy agency may want to rewrite responses. Every tool in an agent's harness becomes an remote procedure call you can make on that machine. Including a tool to execute a shell command, in many. A harness is completely isometric to a backdoor, it's the same code written with a different intention.
- madrox 1mo agoThere's a million ways a bad configuration can take down a network. Especially if the part that gets squirrley is a black box. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568622
- copperx 1mo agoA wire straight to Room 641a.
- jstummbillig 1mo agoWhy would that be probable? People on average are fantastically bad at getting probabilities right.
- esseph 1mo agoHistorical precedent repeated over and over, and the US ties to DoW work, and the national security implications. It's actually the Occam's Razor explanation if you know the history.
- jstummbillig 1mo agoOnly if you ignore baseline rates. Which brings us back to my original point.
- esseph 29d ago4 major AI services all had outages around the same time. Gemini, too. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/four-major-ai-models-suffer-rare-overlapping-downtime/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/four-major-ai-models-suff...
- 1e1a 1mo agoTracking outages as well as any changes in API response time across these providers could be interesting.
- dragonlord664 1mo agoOr it’s monopolistic collaboration at the corporate level which would also be a huge scandal in the US
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- DonHopkins 1mo agoThe NSA used to spy on Americans! They still do, but they used to, too.
- amelius 1mo agoMaybe it was a power hub. And we're not allowed to know where the DC is. If we knew it was a power issue, then with other information (perhaps over time) we could determine the DC location. Or something along these lines.
- jjtheblunt 1mo agoit's also possible one has an outage, routing extraordinary traffic to the other(s), with cascading failures in quick succession.
- esseph 1mo agoWas thinking this exact thing.
- torginus 1mo agoVery likely yes. I wouldn't be surprised if they were hosted from the same datacenters even. There has been a story every few weeks about how Musk has sublet X.ai capacity for one company or another. 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.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1mo agoThe economics of this kind of warfare make no sense to me. The Harkonens must have been incredibly wealthy by running the spice trade, but even after years of saving and plotting said that the transit fees to move the armies by the Guild were ruinous. How could anyone wage war like this? The defenders will always outnumber the attackers.
- freeone3000 1mo agohttps://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-part-i-fighting-faufreluches/ https://acoup.blog/2026/02/24/collections-warfare-in-dune-pa... Lays out an interesting take on this: that armies are quite small, even on developed worlds, because the cost of equipping them is enormous — and the technological advantage is absurd enough that you don’t need a large army. When 300 men can hold a planet, why would you need 1000?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1mo agoSo less guys with knives and more WH40k Space Marines. Impossibly expensive elites who cannot be equaled by a mortal. 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.
- 1mo ago
- seydor 1mo agoThe old PRISM servers got overloaded
- amelius 1mo agoMy biggest question: what else had outages? And is anyone keeping a table of correlations between outages? Sounds like valuable data.
- dgellow 1mo agoWhy would you default to that explanation? That’s not at all a reasonable default, and I say that as something pretty paranoid with regards to US surveillance
- nomel 1mo agoLooking at history, it's much more reasonable to assume there's surveillance, since there are whole branches of the government, and departments, that exist for surveillance in the goal of "national security", which this easily falls into. See Marissa Mayer explaining that it's not an option to refuse [1]. I assume this is just the same ole' Room 641A [2]. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-reportedly-scanned-all-customer-emails-for-us-intelligence-officials-spy-government/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/yahoo-report... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- dgellow 1mo agoWe already know there is surveillance, but why would you default to that explanation for a downtime? As said by others monitoring the traffic isn’t done by routing through the NSA monitoring system, it’s not a bottleneck that would take down all those services. If you look at more details such as the timing it’s even less likely to be the case, but even as a default it’s not a reasonable explanation given the symptoms
- xaxfixho 1mo ago[dead]
- xnx 1mo agoWhy was Gemini was not affected?