Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages
Frontier models from Anthropic , OpenAI , and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from “an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.”
The issues initially appeared to be linked because they coincided—perhaps the result of a shared third-party service provider—but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX , xAI’s parent company, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But the company said as part of its public comments on Thursday: “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.” Anthropic and xAI announced a “compute partnership” with SpaceX in May.
OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski tells 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 declined to comment on the episode. The company began alerting about a “partial outage” at 6:23 am PT on Thursday that 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.
xAI reported Grok outages across all of its platforms and services beginning at 6:30 am PT when 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.
There were scattered reports of a possible Google Gemini outage on Thursday morning as well, but the company did not confirm this or record any incidents on its service status dashboard.