ChatGPT, Claude and Grok hit by simultaneous outages
What's the story
Three of the biggest artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude, faced a major outage on Thursday. The disruptions started at around 11:00am ET for ChatGPT users who were met with error messages when trying to use the service. The status page for OpenAI's chatbot indicated "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex."
Service disruption
ChatGPT unable to generate responses
The outage not only affected conversations with ChatGPT but also impacted other features like logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, image generation, and more.
OpenAI said it has "applied a mitigation" and is "monitoring recovery," though its AI tools are still experiencing "degraded performance."
The incident comes just as OpenAI teased the launch of Astra, its new AI model.
Claude disruption
Claude was down for over an hour
Anthropic's Claude chatbot, along with its Claude Code and the Claude API, went down around the same time as ChatGPT.
CJ Avilla, a technical staff member at Anthropic, said an "infrastructure issue" caused a partial outage across its services.
The company managed to resolve the problem by around 12:15pm ET on Thursday.
Grok glitch
xAI's Grok also faced an outage
Grok, the AI chatbot from Elon Musk's xAI, also faced an outage at around the same time as ChatGPT and Claude.
The issue affected its app on Android and iOS, as well as on the web.
When users tried to prompt the chatbot on X, they were met with a message saying: "This model is overloaded right now. Please try again shortly or pick a different model."
Uncertainty
Microsoft Azure and Google's Gemini also experienced issues
The reason behind these simultaneous outages remains unclear, raising questions about whether they could be linked through shared infrastructure.
Notably, Microsoft Azure was also witnessing a surge in outage reports, with many affected AI services using cloud infrastructure from multiple providers.
Google's Gemini also faced issues for some developers and API users.
Impact
Outages underscore the growing dependence on AI platforms
The disruptions highlight the growing dependence of websites, apps, and developer tools on AI platforms.
When a major model provider goes down, the fallout can be felt beyond users directly visiting an AI chatbot to products that rely on its API in the background.
At the time of writing, OpenAI's status page showed that it had restored affected services.