OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI Hit by Simultaneous Outages, Cause Unclear
On Thursday morning, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all experienced outages within a similar timeframe, though neither OpenAI nor Anthropic pointed to a shared external cause despite the suspicious timing.
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Three of the leading AI companies — Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI — all experienced service outages on Thursday morning, leaving their chatbots unavailable to users at overlapping times.
SpaceX, xAI's parent company, said the Grok disruption stemmed from an outage at its Memphis compute center. The near-simultaneous timing initially suggested the outages might share a cause, possibly a common third-party provider, but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic identified an external source when contacted by Wired. SpaceX did apologize in its public comments to its "impacted compute partners" — Anthropic and xAI had announced a compute partnership with SpaceX back in May.
OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski said a routing error beginning around 7:43 am PT made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable to some users across platforms. A fix was successfully implemented by about 8:17 am PT.
Anthropic declined to comment on the incident. The company had begun alerting to a partial outage at 6:23 am PT, citing elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5. Shortly afterward it said the cause had been identified and a fix deployed, marking the issue fully resolved by 9:16 am PT. Claude Sonnet 5 also briefly showed similar issues just after 9 am PT.
xAI reported Grok outages across all its platforms and services starting at 6:30 am PT, when its status page first showed "investigating outage." The company marked the incident resolved at 10:05 am PT, saying traffic had returned to normal.
There were also scattered reports of a possible Google Gemini outage Thursday morning, though Google neither confirmed the issue nor logged it on its status dashboard, and did not respond to Wired's request for comment.
Simultaneous outages across a sector typically point to a shared cloud provider or content delivery network experiencing problems. However, none of the major infrastructure players — including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure — reported any outages on Thursday.
