If API Responses Turn into 404s, Is Your Factor Model Still Reliable?

At 11 PM last night, I stared at the flashing red error in my terminal—the OpenAI API returned a 503. My backtesting script froze while calling GPT-4 for news sentiment scoring, rendering three hours of feature engineering useless. This isn't the first time it's happened, but every occurrence forces me to re-examine a core question: To what extent are we betting our alpha on someone else's servers?