Just got kicked out while finalising a presentation I'm about to give in 39 minutes.

Wish me luck!

Reminds me of the SNL skit of TV newsreaders when the teleprompter goes down. By the end of it they've gone completely primitive and started killing each other.

found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc0FeUMQIA4

SNL skits have these great ideas every now and then, only if the execution were a bit better, they'd have timeless pieces (like the Monty Python's dirty fork). This one was very funny anyway.

I ASSURE you that SNL skits have wider appeal than Monty Python, which really just appeals to a specific subset.

As a non american SNL is 99.9% asinine crap and pales in comparison to Monty Python even after all this time. May be that's why it has a wider appeal but the formulaic lack of humor and fear of actually punching up comes down to the bitter old man in charge.

Maybe to Americans? Not for the ROW

Was going to share this on Teams to joke about the outage…then the third act come and that it’s definitely nsfw.

One show is produced with edits and retakes if someone flubs a line or breaks, the other is live. Also consider, SNL puts out more content in a single season with 22 episodes at 90 minutes, then all of Monty Python's full run of 45 episodes at 30 minutes. You're comparing apples to oranges.

Sometimes you look at an orange, and think how convenient it'd be if you could bite it like an apple. Okay, many don't, but few who do came up with all the modern fruits :)

That is how the future looks like. One outage and we have no idea what to do if AI is not working.

Shouldn't matter right? You used Claude just to accelerate your production not to outsource your thinking. Its still all your ideas and stuff, so dont worry. am i right?

Of course it matters. If you used Claude just to accelerate production, let's say it makes you twice as productive. That means if you budget 30 minutes to do something, if Claude stops working, it means it'll take you 60. Or you just use the 30 and its half as good, not as polished, any number of things. Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content.

The example are contrived, but still very real.

[delayed]

why stop there? i hear Boris Cherny has thousands of instances running in parallel, he can do it in milliseconds

People with more budget than me give the task of polishing up the powerpoint to an assistant. They don't hire 20 assistants to have the work done 20 times as fast, but that does not negate that having one assistant do it does free up some of their time

Responsible use of Claude behaves much the same, just within my budget

Oh, please. All this snark but you’d lose your mind if someone took away syntax highlighting or your Aeron chair.

I don’t think that’s quite the same

Oh no, my syntax highlighter that charges me per token is offline! and my chair’s seat is missing because the cloud-based seating provider has an outage!

Asinine argument. Are you outsourcing your thinking to the compiler because it gives you warnings, instead of getting an error two hours into your punch card programs's runtime?

People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please

My compiler does not require billions of dollars of opearational infrastructure to work, except for the electrical grid.

And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator.

One claude instance also doesn't need billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work.

Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.

Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what

> People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way?

Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...

Losing skills die to over reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m...

Yes it matters regardless of how much thinking you offloaded. Having the tools you’re using vanish would stop anyone. Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left.

If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine.

My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it.

> Imagine if your favorite editor or other tools vaporized and you had 30 minutes left.

A bit off-topic, but "I" just created my own editor yesterday, maybe took 5 hours and it does everything I need, and I no longer need to swap between VS Code and Zed.

If my favorite editor disappeared I would literally be fine.

Why stop at Claude? Forget computers, bring the good ol' slider projection machine thingie and do super old school.

Even better, if cave painting was good enough thousands of years ago it is good enough today.

No need to be so dramatic. There are a lot of things you can do with just speaking supported by a whiteboard with markers.

When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides.

Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does.

Totally. But today, the room will not be well set up for it, markers may be dry, whiteboard covered in old, settled in diagrams, etc. All solvsble, but not in 30 min.

And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector.

Or whiteboards and blackboards.

Are you people seriously so helpless they can't stand up and talk about what they've been getting paid to do anymore? If so y'all need ai detoxes, you arent even people anymore.

Only Claude understands their codebases... so they probably are not.

[delayed]

I remember back in the days when Word crashed and I hadn't saved saved the last hour of work. A lesson everybody has to learn some day.

I would fire you for multiple reasons, wtf

Your intern rage quit.

We are all bosses now. Until it gets tired of working for us.

I wonder how the presentation is going

And instead of using your time wisely to finish it manually, you're posting about it on HN?

"make a virtue of necessity"

Few months I was in a similar situation, I ended up giving an improvised talk without any slides. I just talked, asked questions and it became a really interactive session. I also ended up showing websites and run into details people didn't understand. Afterward I heard people really enjoyed the talk!

So... be creative :)

I have a bad bad feeling about the outages happening today

its not that deep

Could be singularity or just Friday 13th

I have a great feeling, it's cruisy as hell without emails! I'm able to get a morning of focus work done without interruption, and then I think it'll be a POETS Day.

So you are just waiting for the HN outage now?

I've not seen anyone use the term poet's day for many years. My dad used to be a tax accountant for British Rail and said that it was old corporate slang. (Piss off early, tomorrow's Saturday.)

good friday gift for europeans who don't work at Microsoft that's for sure

It really is Friday the 13th today with outlook and now Claude both being mostly down. I wonder if this is related though. Either way not going to be a great ad for their IPO.

> Either way not going to be a great ad for their IPO.

Utility customer satisfaction goes up after power outages.

Obviously there are caveats to that. They must be rare, have decent communication, etc. But the point is that people will take always-on services for granted and be reminded of how much their lives are improved when they suddenly don't have them.

Microsoft+Claude make it a perfect AI day.

I didn't think an over-reliance on AI and firing all the human coders would come back to bite them so quickly.

I'd guess what we see today is just a demo version of what's coming.

A trial run.

I'm more concerned about what's coming when AI works fine. We aren't in the enshittification phase yet.

I think AI started in the shitty phase, we may need a new term for when it gets worse than it already is.

> Great catch!

How is this biting anyone?

Its friday, people will just do certain things later.

I got logged out of Claude in the morning, she couldn’t get back in without email. I guess Anthropic can keep their twenty bucks / days in November, for today.

somewhere down the line, a hook that triggers through an outlook email, didn't trigger today

Don't worry, it'll trigger twice tomorrow. Or the day after. And everything will be fine, right?

Microsoft PM-s overloading Claude with outage solution prompts.

Where is your god now?

Does every large company have a big server with some h100s and a couple of open weight models for just such an occasion. Especially if you don’t have the luxury of being able to wait or postpone eg under cyber attack?

Just get an OpenRouter or Vercel account. Your option aren't pay Anthropic or buy hardware yourself, there are hundreds of providers out there.

Claude has us locked in right now while they subsidize cheap usage to get us subscribed and dependent on their monthly plans.

As temporary backup, one can use claude models hosted on GCP - my understanding is that those don't depend on platform.claude.com and should be available even if main claude platform is dead

There is an absolute tonne of competition.

Only until NVIDIA starts cryptography verification and block anything not from US closed models, which should be anytime soon

I hope that doesn’t happen. There is a good alternative: if MOE models work for you, then Apple Silicon does a decent job at inference using whatever harnesses you like.

Unacceptable. Just started my workday and four projects are now ruined due to modified source files.

"ruined due to modified source files"?

Taking immutability discipline to new levels!

It's one way to describe the way some people write code I suppose.

Where is the version control?

‘Unacceptable’ is exactly what I would say to anyone relying on a cloud service that has exactly zero SLA.

Unless you’re on a negotiated 99.9% contract, you accepted this.

Your next question on Claude should be "how do I setup a git server and how to use it"

oh no wha happand, how terrible, nooo

millions/billions around the world suddenly lose the ability to speelchek

Good thing is at can expect some compensation such as resets. And yeah - diversify your providers, is the same with electricity from utility perspective…

I only have one grid connected where do I get a second?

Large consumers often have two independent grid feeds.

OK. I’m not a large consumer.

If you were to setup a GPU cluster in your basement and consume TWs of power, the grid going down would no longer be your problem. It would become their problem! /s

.. to the same grid. If you're lucky they're to different substations.

The number of people who had "independent" fiber connections which were routed through the same channel and destroyed by the same backhoe is so high it's a meme among sysadmins.

Do you disambiguate between failure of the grid and failure of the usine? Like failure of the power generator is not the same as cut wires. And in terms of AI and internet providers - both can be easily diversified.

Besides, what is it that you guys expect from a large scale provider of essentially experimental technology??

That's what a UPS and a backup generator were for, even before PV and industrial-scale batteries became a thing.

I fully agree on the snark, but if anyone seriously considers backup from grid...

Get an islanding-capable inverter separating your internal power setup from grid, connect it with battery systems - you can control battery charging and have "microgrid UPS" then. Combine it with solar power feeding as second feed into inverter. Scale battery and solar panels as needed. If you have third input, can add three-phase genset (I recommend looking for propane fueled one if you don't want to care about fuel going bad)

I have this pretty much and generating way too much power for our needs which is great. And that includes car charging for light but significant use. I export a lot during peak hours from the battery as there is a lot of surplus.

But I was snarking on "provider". There are 100s of providers where I live but one grid and you can't use two concurrently.

My backup in the past has been a local library for internet and laptop power and everything else can wait.

Time to do some downtime aktivities like in xkcd 303.

Working fine for me here in Europe.

Same

it was down in the UK for approx 20 mins but only affected auth

Working fine for me.

Is it? Huh

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50481187

Hey claude users: is there a way to access claude without being gated by a whatwg cartel web engine?

"Software is solved" they said.

Just need GitHub to stop by and join the outage party.

And Cloudflare too, please God.

The two of you are going to jinx it.

Oh no. Anyway...

Will we be able to call in sick in future if Claude is down?

The prayers to Yellowstone are working. Give the magma chamber everything you’ve got, we are so close to ending it.

Imagine relying on AI for work and not having backup.

My strategy: diversification. I run deepseek harness (which I made a vs code integration for and extended it a lot with plugins) and integrated it with my codex and claude subscriptions as well as an openrouter account. This way I can switch models and providers during my sessions and does not get blocked on such things.

Useful for - outages - running out of quota - failing agents e.g. because of "cyber" flaging

How long has this been working for you? (Or others).

Since Anthropic doesn't seem to like subscriptions being used in third party harness, do they actually enforce that nowadays?

https://github.com/micw/claude-wrapper-advanced I wrap their CLI ^^

Edit: CLI in headless mode is an official feature

For coding, I wouldn't use deepseek as a replacement. At least not for anything hard.

Except that DeepSeek Harness is very well done. It is not just the model.

Good diversification. I like to have a strong local model like qwen3.8-flash-next available because I live in the mountains and my Internet is not 100% reliable. I don’t get it that companies allow themselves to get locked in on one vendor. Two or more, with local makes more sense.

Future is local, onpremise

> A fix has been deployed for the issue affecting Claude services and we are monitoring for recovery. > Nov 13, 09:58 UTC