Users across the globe were unable to access some of the major AI chatbots on Thursday morning. In a scary coincidence, SpaceX’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini all went down for a while. Even more of a freak coincidence is that these AI services suffered outages within the same window. Downdetector logged tens of thousands of complaints beginning around 7:30 AM PT, with OpenAI's ChatGPT bearing the brunt of user reports. Meanwhile, Grok, run by SpaceXAI, was down for roughly three and a half hours, according to the company's own status page.
— WIRED (@WIRED) [ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all suffered outages at nearly the exact same time for reasons that remain murky.][https://t.co/bMKc1IN6Th][September 3, 2026]
SpaceX Is Sorry
SpaceXAI posted a statement acknowledging that the blip occurred at its Memphis compute center.* "We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,"* the company wrote. Reposting the same post on X/Twitter, Elon Musk reassured that such instances won’t repeat in the future. He remarked.
And we are taking corrective action to ensure this does not happen again.
[— SpaceXAI (@SpaceXAI)][September 3, 2026]
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
[And we are taking corrective action to ensure this does not happen again][https://t.co/xaLI3jXMRR][September 3, 2026]
What Went Wrong?
OpenAI blamed a routing error that knocked out ChatGPT and Codex for some users. It remarked that a fix was in place by around 8:17 AM PT. There is a sneaking suspicion that an Azure East US ingress failure was recorded near 10:26 AM PT, a region several AI firms lean on heavily. Anthropic's Claude also reported a partial outage the same morning, though it stopped short of confirming a direct link to the Memphis facility.
In Other News
Sam Altman recently compared the water consumption of ChatGPT queries with production of a single California almond. Does his argument hold any merit? Read in the article below.
See Also: Sam Altman Says Almonds Suck More Water Than ChatGPT Queries; Internet ROFLs With Memes
Cover: illustrative / [Pexels](https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-smartphone-on-table-3747132/)
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[Google Gemini outage](/google-gemini-outage)