As if a million white collar workers suddenly cried out in terror at once, a great disturbance in the AI force forced down every major AI chatbot service — a brief moment of reprieve from our AI empire overlords.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and X’s Grok mysteriously went down Thursday morning, and we still don’t know what’s behind it.
“All the AI is down,” as one X user put it buntly.
OpenAI’s status page noted “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.” “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the company wrote.
While X’s Grok shows widespread outages, Anthropic’s Claude status page noted that the “only affected models right now are Opus 4.8 and Opus 5.” “The rest of the models have recovered to baseline error rate,” Anthropic’s website reads.
Spiking and falling reported incidents on Downdetector suggest outages affecting OpenAI’s services have largely been resolved. Other services, including Google and the popular video game “Fortnite,” continue to experience issues.
Netizens were quick to joke about out the unusual outage affecting almost every major AI chatbot service, describing a momentary glimpse of lucidity for a society obsessed with a tech that’s deteriorating our cognitive abilities.
“Finally I can see the Sun!” one account tweeted. “And for a brief moment, millions of people had to use their brains again,” journalist and noted AI critic Paris Marx quipped in a Bluesky post.
“If you are renting your brain, what happens during global rent-a-brain outage?” another user joked.
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