LLMs in Prod: The Reality of AI Outages, No LLM is Immune
This is Part 2 of our series analyzing Portkey's critical insights from production LLM deployments. Today, we're diving deep into provider reliability data from 650+ organizations, examining outages, error rates, and the real impact of downtime on AI applications. From the infamous OpenAI outage to the daily challenges of rate limits, we'll reveal why 'hope isn't a strategy' when it comes to LLM infrastructure
šØ LLMs in Production: Day 3
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
āHope isnāt a strategy.ā
When your LLM provider goes downāand trust us, it willāhow ready are you?
Today, weāre sharing fresh data from 650+ orgs on LLM provider reliability, downtime strategies, and how to keep things running smoothly (whileā¦
Before that, hereās a recap from Part 1 of LLMs in Prod:
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
⢠@OpenAI dominance is eroding, with Anthropic slowly but steadily gaining ground
⢠@AnthropicAI requests are growing at a staggering 61% MoM
⢠@Google Vertex AI is finally gaining momentum after a rocky start.
Now,⦠pic.twitter.com/4MjD63EWyJ
Remember the OpenAI Outage?
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
In just one day, they reminded the world how critical they areāby taking everything offline for ~4 hours. š
But hereās the thing: this wasnāt an anomaly.
Outages like these are a recurring pattern across ALL providers.
Which begs the question: why⦠pic.twitter.com/HYNVeZlSpo
š Over the past year, error spikes hit every providerāfrom 429s to 5xxs, no one was spared.
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
The truth?
Thereās no pattern, no guarantees, and no immunity.
If youāre not prepared with multi-provider setups, youāre inviting downtime.
Reliability isnāt optionalāitās table⦠pic.twitter.com/MDpSfSrYft
Rate Limit Reality Check:
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
⢠@GroqInc : 21.11%
⢠@Perplexity: 12.24%
⢠@AnthropicAI : 5.60%
⢠@Azure OpenAI: 1.74%
Translation: If you're not handling rate limits gracefully, you're gambling with user experience.
Your customers wonāt wait for infra to catch up. Are you⦠pic.twitter.com/GiJwXdPMuQ
But rate limits are just the tip of the iceberg.
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
Server Error (5xx) rates this year:
⢠Groq: 0.67%
⢠Anthropic: 0.56%
⢠Perplexity: 0.39%
⢠Gemini: 0.32%
⢠Bedrock: 0.28%
Even "small" error rates = thousands of failed requests at scale.
These arenāt just numbersātheyāre⦠pic.twitter.com/0CqdEGfYc0
So, whatās the solution?
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
The hard truth? Your users don't care why your AI features failed.
They just know you failed.
The key isnāt choosing the ābestā providerāitās building a system that works when things go wrong:
š” Diversify providers.
š” Implement caching.
š” Build smartā¦
6/ Why caching matters:
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
Performance optimization is critical, and hereās where caching delivers results:
⢠36% average cache hit rate (peaks for Q&A use cases)
⢠30x faster response times
⢠38% cost reduction
Caching isn't optional at scaleāit's your first line of defense. pic.twitter.com/YX7YvwkmMS
Thatās it for today! Follow @PortkeyAI for more on LLMs in Prod Series
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024
— Portkey (@PortkeyAI) December 13, 2024