Three of the world’s most widely used AI chatbots experienced outages at roughly the same time on Thursday, September 3, leaving users unable to reliably access ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.

The disruption affected OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok, with thousands of users reporting problems. The simultaneous nature of the outage quickly attracted attention, raising questions about whether the services were experiencing a common infrastructure problem.

ChatGPT users reported difficulties with features including logging in, uploading files, generating images and using voice mode. OpenAI also reported problems affecting Codex, its coding-focused service.

OpenAI later said a routing error was responsible for its disruption. 

According to reports, Grok began experiencing outages at around 11:30pm AEST on September 3, followed by ChatGPT at around 1am AEST on September 4. Anthropic said it resolved Claude’s partial outage at around 2:15am AEST.

Anthropic’s partial outage affected Claude and Claude Code, as well as its API. The company said it identified the issue and deployed a fix, resolving the problem later that morning. 

Grok also went offline across its Android, iOS and web platforms. xAI said the problem was due to an outage at its Memphis computer centre. Service was restored later in the day, according to the company’s status updates.

The timing of the incidents led to speculation that the three outages might have been connected. Major AI services rely on complex networks of cloud computing, data centres and other infrastructure, meaning a failure at a shared provider could potentially affect multiple companies. However, there was no confirmed evidence that a single third-party provider caused the disruptions.

There were also reports that some users encountered problems with Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, although the extent and causes differed and Google did not confirm a corresponding outage. 

The outages highlight the growing dependence on AI services for work, software development, research and other everyday tasks. As more companies integrate generative AI into their business and consumer applications, even a brief interruption can have a wider impact.