Not intending to defend OpenAI here, but their MAU (800 million) does dwarf most other AI companies, anthropic included. I do not envy the engineers there working on scaling.
Not sure MAU is the best metric here. I was recently surprised to find out their revenues are actually kind of close 12B vs 7B, so maybe closer (than could be fairly described as being dwarfed) in terms of token count?
As they say, every cloud outage has a silver lining.
* Give the computers a rest, they probably need it. Heck, maybe the Internet should just shut down in the evening so everyone can go to bed (ignoring those pesky timezone differences)
* Free chaos engineering at the cloud provider region scale, except you didn't opt in to this one and know about in advance, making it extra effective
* Quickly figure out a map which of the things you use have a dependency on a single AWS region without no capability to change or re-route
This still happens in some places. In various parts of Europe there are legal obligations not to email employees out of hours if it is avoidable. Volkswagen famously adopted a policy in Germany of only enabling receipt of new email messages for most of their employees 30 minutes before start of the working day, then disabling 30 minutes after the end, with weekends turned off also. You can leave work on Friday and know you won't be receiving further emails until Monday.
