Three major AI firms lost service on Thursday morning
Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all went offline on Thursday morning. Downtime hit their chatbots and related services. SpaceX, the parent company of xAI, stated on Thursday afternoon that the problems with Grok stemmed from an outage at their Memphis compute centre.
The incidents appeared linked because they happened at the same time. This coincidence might suggest a shared third-party provider was at fault. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic mentioned an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The company added this to its public statement: “We’d also like to apologise to our impacted compute partners.” Anthropic and xAI announced a “compute partnership” with SpaceX in May.
OpenAI blames a routing error
OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski told WIRED: “A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms. As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.”
Anthropic sees partial outage
Anthropic declined to comment on the episode. The company began alerting about a “partial outage” at 6:23 am PT on Thursday. This involved “elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5.” Shortly after, the company said it had “identified the cause” and that “a fix has been deployed.” The company marked the issue as resolved by 9:16 am PT. Claude Sonnet 5 seemed to briefly have similar issues shortly after 9 am PT.
Grok goes down across all services
xAI reported Grok outages across all of its platforms and services beginning at 6:30 am PT. The company posted “investigating outage” on its service status page. “Grok is experiencing issues. We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible,” the page said. At 10:05 am PT the episode was marked complete. “We have resolved the situation, and traffic is healthy again,” the company wrote.
Google remains silent
There were scattered reports of a possible Google Gemini outage on Thursday morning as well. The company did not confirm this or record any incidents on its service status dashboard. Google did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment ahead of publication.
No shared infrastructure culprit found
Typically, multiple outages in the same sector at the same time would point to a cloud provider, content delivery network, or other third-party vendor having issues affecting multiple customers. But OpenAI and Anthropic did not point to a potential shared cause. Major players in the internet infrastructure space, including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, did not report outages on Thursday.
What it means
Users relying on these specific models lost access during the window. The lack of a unified explanation suggests the failures were internal or isolated to specific compute nodes rather than a widespread internet backbone collapse. Developers cannot yet determine if their own integrations are at risk of similar downtime without further data from the providers.
