True AI-pocalypse as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all go down at once

OpenAI says its ChatGPT service is recovering from a limited outage this morning amid similar problems affecting SpaceX's Grok and Anthropic's Claude. It might not be a good time for a chat. "A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3 made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms," a company spokesperson told The Register. "As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored." The OpenAI status page showed elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex at the time this story was filed. Anthropic's Claude status page shows the service has recovered after a three-hour six-minute outage, during which there were elevated error rates affecting Sonnet 5 and other models. Anthropic confirmed the outage has been resolved. Claude is fully back up after an infrastructure issue caused a partial outage across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API earlier today," a spokesperson told The Register. Service was restored at 16:16 UTC." SpaceX's status page for Grok indicates that the company began looking into an outage at 6:30 am PT. "Grok is experiencing issues," the page says. "We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible." The co-occurrence of availability issues at three different AI providers suggests the possibility of trouble at a common provider. But Cloudflare - used in different capacities by all three AI companies - said rather emphatically that its systems are running fine. "Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time," a spokesperson told The Register. "Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect." Meanwhile, the three major US cloud computing providers - AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure - show no sign of relevant technical difficulties on their respective status pages, which don't always reflect problems in a timely manner. We hope you used this brief AI blackout to come up with your own explanation for this unusual coincidence. (R) Updated to add at 1608 PT on September 3, 2026 This afternoon, SpaceX apologized in a post that suggests one potential reason for Anthropic's network woes. We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning," the company said. We'd also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners. All systems have now been restored and are functioning nominally."