Major AI Chatbots Experience Rare Overlapping Outages
4 sources across 3 countries · United States · Spain · United Kingdom
Who reported this
- WIRED
- Ars Technica
- El Pais
- The Register
What the colours mean
- Left
- Centre-left
- Centre
- Centre-right
- Right
- A hatched block means the outlet is affiliated with, or controlled by, a state.
Political lean describes where an outlet sits within the politics of its own country. It is never a position on a single global scale.
Political lean is comparable inside one country and not across them, which is why the bar groups by country first. Publicly funded broadcasters are not marked as state-linked.
The owner of each outlet is listed as a matter of record, not as a judgement about the outlet.
Several leading artificial intelligence services, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, suffered significant service interruptions on Thursday, September 3. OpenAI reported that a routing error starting around 7:43 am PT made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users, with a solution implemented by 8:17 am PT. Anthropic reported a partial outage affecting various Claude models starting at 6:23 am PT, which was resolved by 9:16 am PT. xAI reported that Grok experienced issues beginning at 6:30 am PT, with service restored by 10:05 am PT. Some reports also mentioned potential issues with Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot, though Google did not confirm an outage.
The simultaneous nature of the failures led to speculation regarding a shared third party provider. Cloudflare denied experiencing any disruptions, and major cloud providers AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure showed no signs of technical difficulties on their status pages. However, SpaceX, the parent company of xAI, later apologized for an outage at its Memphis compute center and extended that apology to its impacted compute partners. WIRED noted that Anthropic and xAI had announced a compute partnership with SpaceX in May.
Outlets with a center lean focused on the technical specifics of the routing errors and the unusual coincidence of the timing. Outlets with a center left lean framed the event as a global crash of the big AI chatbots.
How each side framed it
- Centre-left
- These outlets framed the event as a global crash affecting the industry's largest platforms.
- Centre
- These outlets focused on the technical details of the outages and the investigation into a potential shared cause.
Sources
- Centre Ars Technica: Four major AI models suffer rare overlapping downtime
- Centre-left El Pais: The big artificial intelligence 'chatbots' suffer a global crash and stop working
- Centre The Register: True AI-pocalypse as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all go down at once
- Centre-left WIRED: Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
93% of the statements in this article were traced back to the source articles listed above.