Three of the most widely used AI chatbots — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude — went down at roughly the same time on September 3, 2026, leaving users unable to access core features across all three platforms.
ChatGPT began returning error messages around 11AM ET, with OpenAI’s status page citing “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.” The outage affected not just conversations but also logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, and image generation. OpenAI said it had “applied a mitigation” and was “monitoring recovery,” though its tools remained in a state of “degraded performance.” The disruption coincided with OpenAI teasing the launch of Astra, its new AI model.
Anthropic’s issues began slightly earlier, around 10:30AM ET, initially impacting Claude, Claude Code, and the API across several model versions including Mythos/Fable 5.1, Mythos/Fable 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8, and Opus 4.6. The company later said the outage had narrowed to Opus 4.8 and Opus 5. Anthropic technical staff member CJ Avilla attributed the disruption to an “infrastructure issue” in a post on X, adding: “We’re working on it but don’t have an ETA yet.”
Grok experienced outages across its Android and iOS apps as well as on the web. Users attempting to use the chatbot on X received a message stating: “This model is overloaded right now. Please try again shortly or pick a different model.” xAI’s status page said the company was “working on restoring service as quickly as possible.”
It remains unclear what caused the outages or whether the problems across the three platforms are related. The Verge reported it had reached out to OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic for comment but had not received responses at the time of publication. The simultaneous nature of the disruptions may raise questions for businesses and users who rely on these services, though no cause linking the outages has been confirmed.
Source: The Verge