[24466] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Script of my national radio report yesterday
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lauren Weinstein)
Tue Sep 8 10:39:49 2026
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2026 07:30:00 -0700
From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>
To: privacy-dist@vortex.com
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This is the script of my national network radio tech report yesterday
regarding the recent mysterious simultaneous outage of multiple AI
services and what this tells us about trusting Big Tech. As always
there may have been some minor wording variations from this script as
I presented this report live on air.
- - -
Yeah so this is a quite bizarre story and it carries an important
lesson with it. Big Tech is far more fragile than their billionaire
CEOs want us to believe, and trusting everything that they tell you is
probably not a good bet. Because they've got untold billions heading
into trillions of dollars tied up in trying to find ways to make us
dependent on them and in significant respects, controlled by them.
So what happened this time? Well, late last week, three or maybe four
of the big AI services went down generally for some number of hours,
pretty much simultaneously. And none of the firms so far appear to
have been forthcoming with details of what happened. Gee, almost like
they really don't want us to know the facts. The services disrupted
included ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and depending on which reports you're
looking at, maybe or maybe not there was some disruption of Gemini as
well. If we're not buying into the coincidence theory, how could
something like this happen?
It's important to realize that these big AI companies running these AI
models are becoming in some ways reminiscent of a kind of cartel.
Massive amounts of money that keep their financial shell games afloat
are flowing around, compute capacity for their ever hungry AIs is
rented and traded and manipulated in ways that are typically not
obvious from the outside. So there is a strong suspicion inside the
technical community that this simultaneous outage was in some way
associated with such shared resources. There are some clues, though
few details.
Apparently Microsoft Azure cloud services which provide significant
compute resources may have had a disruption during this period.
SpaceXAI said they had an outage in their Memphis data center.
Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services however said their systems were all
operating normally during the period in question. We may never really
know the details.
With the concentration of computing power in the hands of just a few
enormous companies, we're seeing larger and larger disruptions of
services -- not just AI or websites, but sometimes even basic mobile
phone services also, which these days often depend on a functioning
Internet and centralized cloud resources to operate at all. And you
can see why some firms are not exactly enthusiastic at the prospect of
explaining why their heavily promoted services can break down suddenly
over such large areas.
Ultimately, this is another basic trust issue, and Big Tech is losing
the trust battle more than ever. Increasing numbers of serious AI
incidents, sometimes not reported for weeks, or perhaps ever.
Nondisclosure agreements hiding plans for massive data centers that
will destroy communities, data centers that are now a top bipartisan
issue for the upcoming midterms, with polls saying 75% of people
oppose them. AI systems spewing sometimes dangerous misinformation. AI
agents that the firms won't take responsibility for when they horribly
mangle your data.
Big Tech's reticence to come clean regarding the systems that they
want us all to become dependent on seems to be moving rapidly into the
category of treating us like their own personal serfs, and this latest
incident of simultaneous downtime is just another example that we can
add to their pile of shame.
Not just data centers, but also Big Tech firms in general are in the
political spotlight. These giant companies need to operate in the
service of society, not as would-be overlords of our lives. And the
sooner that politicians and these firms get that message, the better
for us all.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Signal: By request on need to know basis
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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