OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI Suffer Simultaneous Outages With No Clear Cause
Original: Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
Why This Matters
Simultaneous outages across competing AI platforms raise questions about shared infrastructure dependencies in the AI industry.
On September 3, 2026, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all experienced outages around the same time. OpenAI cited a routing error resolved by 8:17 am PT; Anthropic marked issues resolved by 9:16 am PT; xAI attributed its outage to a Memphis compute center failure. No shared cause was confirmed.
On Thursday, September 3, 2026, frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI suffered rare simultaneous outages affecting ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok respectively.
OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski told WIRED that "a routing error starting around 7:43 am PT" made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users, with a fix implemented by approximately 8:17 am PT. Anthropic began alerting users to a "partial outage" at 6:23 am PT affecting Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5, marking the issue resolved by 9:16 am PT. xAI, a SpaceX subsidiary, attributed Grok's outage — which began at 6:30 am PT — to "an outage at our Memphis compute center," with service restored by 10:05 am PT. SpaceX also issued an apology to "impacted compute partners." Anthropic and xAI announced a compute partnership with SpaceX in May, raising speculation of a shared infrastructure link, but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external shared cause. Major infrastructure providers including Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft Azure reported no outages. Google did not confirm reports of a Gemini outage.