AI’s Very Bad Morning: Claude, ChatGPT and Grok Had Outages at the Same Time

On Thursday morning, outages shut down OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude AI, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok starting around 9:30 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector reports. Anthropic developer CJ Avilla cited infrastructure issues, and Quartz reported that Microsoft Azure problems may have contributed, though companies did not confirm a common cause. Services were restored by later in the day.

For anyone who has come to rely on AI chatbots, especially for work, Thursday morning was rough. According to online reports https://www.pcmag.com/news/chatgpt-claude-gemini-and-more-are-all-down-right-now , including from staffers at the companies that make them, outages shut down some of the most popular AI services: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude AI, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok. The widespread outages appear to have started around 9:30 a.m. ET, according to https://downdetector.com/status/claude-ai/ user-submitted https://downdetector.com/status/openai/ reports on https://downdetector.com/status/grok/ Downdetector https://downdetector.com/status/googlegemini/ . CJ Avilla, an Anthropic developer, said in an X post https://x.com/cjav dev/status/2095519763581538376 that infrastructure issues were causing outages across Claude services. A few hours later, he reported that things were back to normal. Representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI did not immediately return requests for comment. As of this writing, ChatGPT and Claude AI were back to normal, according to their respective status pages. That appears to be the case for xAI’s Grok https://status.x.ai/ and Google’s cloud services https://status.cloud.google.com/ as well. AI services often rely on the same cloud computing services, and, as TradingKey points out https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/262149474-chatgpt-claude-grok-outage-openai-anthropic-xai-azure-ai-infrastructure-tradingkey , this can lead to infrastructure outages across multiple services when things go wrong. Still, it’s unusual for multiple AI services to experience problems at the same time. Avilla’s comment about infrastructure issues could point to problems with cloud service providers such as Amazon or Microsoft. Though none of the companies involved has yet to confirm a common denominator for the morning outages, Quartz reports https://qz.com/chatgpt-claude-grok-simultaneous-outages-090326 that Microsoft Azure problems, which coincided with the outages, may have been a contributing factor.