The simultaneous outage of ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok

A planned event or a genuine glitch?

Three of the world's leading artificial intelligence services experienced issues almost simultaneously, temporarily cutting off users from tools that have become part of millions of people's daily routines. On the morning of September 3, 2026, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all recorded outages with overlapping timeframes.

Reports of issues with Google's Gemini also surfaced, although the company did not officially confirm a service outage. In the case of OpenAI, the problems began around 11:00 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time. The company's status page reported high error rates for ChatGPT and Codex. For many users, this simply meant being unable to chat with the bot, but the outage affected a much wider range of features. Logins, file uploads, voice mode, web search, Deep Research, and image generation also experienced issues.

OpenAI implemented mitigation measures and subsequently reported that services had been restored; almost simultaneously, xAI was facing its own issues, with Cloud, Cloud Code, and the developer-facing API all affected. The company identified the cause as an infrastructure problem and implemented a fix. By around 12:15 PM U.S. Eastern Time, the main outage had been resolved.

Grok, developed by xAI, also experienced difficulties.

The problems began even earlier—around 9:30 AM—when users encountered messages stating that the model was overloaded and suggesting they try again or select a different model. The failure affected the Android, iOS, and web versions of Grok. xAI later attributed the issue to an outage at its data center in Memphis, USA. This coincidence immediately raised a question: How could three different companies face problems at practically the same time? As of the time I am finalizing the script for this episode, there is no definitive answer. The companies have not announced a common cause for the outages.