Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
Neither electricity, nor the Internet is provided by one or two organizations globally, both with a blast radius that quite often takes out all of their services.
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
Globally no, but in the US there probably at most 2 providers covering your area + 5G/LTE providers. Electricity - single provider in the area. So if your job is on-site, then entire company stops working when either goes out. You don't really care that another company on the other side of the globe or street continues working.
We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.
> You don't really care that another company on the other side of the globe or street continues working.
As somebody in need of a doctor, on a plane etc. I'd definitely consider it much worse if all hospitals, air traffic controllers etc. stopped working at the same time instead of just a local subset.
netdevphoenix · · focus · HN ↗
psyphy2 · · focus · HN ↗
(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
0x457 · · focus · HN ↗
We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.
lxgr · · focus · HN ↗
As somebody in need of a doctor, on a plane etc. I'd definitely consider it much worse if all hospitals, air traffic controllers etc. stopped working at the same time instead of just a local subset.