For anyone who has come to rely on AI chatbots, especially for work, the morning of Sept. 3 was rough.
According to online reports, 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.
CNETThe widespread outages appear to have started around 9:30 a.m. ET, according to user-submitted reports on Downdetector.
CJ Avilla, an Anthropic developer, said in an X post 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 a request 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 and Google’s cloud services as well.
AI services often rely on the same cloud computing services, and, as TradingKey points out, 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 that Microsoft Azure problems, which coincided with the outages, may have been a contributing factor.
Omar Gallaga has covered technology, digital culture and other topics for outlets including CNET, NPR, WIRED, Texas Monthly, MSNBC, Consumer Reports, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and the Austin American-Statesman, where he was a longtime tech reporter, editor and podcaster. He lives in the Texas Hill Country. See full bio
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