Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
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On Thursday morning, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI experienced rare outages, causing downtime for their AI chatbots. xAI's parent company, SpaceX, attributed Grok's issues to an outage at their Memphis compute center. Anthropic reported a "partial outage" affecting "Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5," which was resolved by 9:16 am PT, with Claude Sonnet 5 also briefly affected. Despite multiple outages in the same sector, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic indicated a shared cause, and major internet infrastructure providers reported no related issues.
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. Google did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment ahead of publication.
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, and major players in the internet infrastructure space—including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure—did not report outages on Thursday.