Major AI Services Face Overlapping Outages

Major artificial intelligence services, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok, experienced widespread and overlapping outages on Thursday, September 3, 2026, disrupting users globally. Google's Gemini also reported issues, though the company did not confirm a full platform outage. The disruptions began Thursday morning, with reports of problems with Claude and Grok emerging shortly after 9:25 a.m. Eastern Time. OpenAI's ChatGPT followed with reported issues around 10:43 a.m. ET. The simultaneous failures affected thousands of users who rely on these AI tools for work and daily tasks, leading to significant attention from industry observers. While the companies involved have offered explanations for their individual service interruptions, a common root cause for the overlapping outages has not been publicly confirmed. OpenAI attributed its issues to a routing error that affected ChatGPT and its Codex coding tool. Anthropic cited infrastructure issues for Claude's partial outage, and xAI stated that an outage at its Memphis compute center impacted Grok. The timing of the outages raised questions about potential links through shared infrastructure.