OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI experience simultaneous outages

On Thursday, September 3, 2026, leading AI providers OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI suffered rare, simultaneous outages that disrupted services for tens of thousands of users. OpenAI blamed a routing error for disabling ChatGPT and Codex, while Anthropic cited an infrastructure issue affecting its Claude models. SpaceX, which partners with xAI and Anthropic, attributed Grok's downtime to an outage at its Memphis compute center. All services were restored within a few hours.

Simultaneous AI chatbot outages

• ▪Tens of thousands of users reported service issues with OpenAI on Downdetector during the September 3, 2026 outage
• ▪The OpenAI outage affected ChatGPT logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, image generation, and the Codex AI coding tool
• ▪Frontier AI models and chatbots from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI experienced simultaneous outages on the morning of Thursday, September 3, 2026

xAI Memphis compute center

• ▪Anthropic and xAI announced a compute partnership with SpaceX in May 2026
• ▪SpaceX stated that the September 3, 2026 Grok outages resulted from an outage at its Memphis compute center
• ▪SpaceX issued an apology to its impacted compute partners following the September 3, 2026 Memphis compute center outage

OpenAI routing error explanation

• ▪OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski stated that a routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on September 3, 2026 made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable
• ▪The OpenAI outage occurred while the company was teasing the launch of Astra, its new AI model

Service restoration timeline

• ▪xAI reported Grok outages across Android, iOS, and web platforms beginning at 6:30 am PT (9:30 am ET) on September 3, 2026, and resolved the situation by 10:05 am PT
• ▪Anthropic began alerting users of a partial outage at 6:23 am PT on September 3, 2026, which was marked resolved by 9:16 am PT
• ▪OpenAI implemented a solution to its routing error by 8:17 am PT on September 3, 2026

Shared infrastructure speculation

• ▪There were unconfirmed reports of a Google Gemini outage on September 3, 2026, but Google did not record any incidents on its status dashboard
• ▪Major internet infrastructure players, including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, did not report outages on September 3, 2026

Anthropic infrastructure issue

• ▪The Anthropic outage caused elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5, Claude Code, and the Claude API
• ▪Anthropic technical staff member CJ Avilla stated that an infrastructure issue caused the partial outage across Anthropic's services on September 3, 2026

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