Summary
- ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok faced outages on Thursday morning.
- Users reported that the unavailability of these AI tools hindered their writing, research, and coding activities.
- By Thursday afternoon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI had restored their services.
On Thursday morning, users encountered service interruptions with ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, which prevented access to these AI platforms and their functionalities.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI acknowledged the issues, but it remains uncertain whether the outages were related.
Myriad: What are your predictions for the release of GPT-6 by OpenAI? Make a prediction here.Users took to X to express their frustrations about the outages, stating that the loss of these AI tools significantly impacted their work, which included writing, research, coding, and other daily tasks.
“Claude, Grok and ChatGPT. How can anyone get any work done?” lamented chemist and science communicator Simon Maechling on X.
“ChatGPT is down, and I am immediately 50 IQ points dumber,” joked Dan Shipper, an AI tool developer.
OpenAI received the most complaints, with reports on Downdetector peaking at around 38,000. Among users reporting specific issues, 80% indicated problems with ChatGPT, while 8% pointed to Codex and 7% to the app itself.
The company began investigating elevated issues affecting ChatGPT and Codex at 10:43 a.m. EST, with a mitigation measure applied at 11:17 a.m. while monitoring for recovery.
“A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3 made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms,” an OpenAI spokesperson explained to Decrypt. “A solution was successfully implemented around 8:17 a.m. PT and is still under observation.”
Anthropic started addressing heightened error rates for Claude Sonnet 5 at 8:37 a.m. EST and resolved the issue just 19 minutes later, as noted on its status page.
A subsequent incident affecting various Claude models occurred at 9:26 a.m. EST. Anthropic identified the issue, implemented a fix, and concluded the incident by 12:16 p.m. EST without disclosing the cause.
The peak number of Claude complaints on Downdetector reached nearly 1,400, with Claude Chat making up 35% of categorized reports, Claude Code at 34%, and the app at 23%.
“Claude is fully operational again after an infrastructure issue caused a partial outage across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API earlier today. Service was restored at 16:16 UTC,” an Anthropic spokesperson informed Decrypt.
Elon Musk’s xAI acknowledged an outage affecting Grok’s web and mobile applications, its presence on X, and two API regions in the U.S. The company stated at 9:30 a.m. EST that it was investigating and working to restore service. Complaints about Grok peaked at around 1,400.
By 12:55 p.m., 12:16 p.m., and 1:07 p.m. EST, the outages for ChatGPT and Codex, Claude, and Grok were all resolved, respectively, according to the companies.
Myriad: Which company will be the next to go public? Make your prediction here.This recent disruption is just the latest in a history of outages experienced by AI chatbots.
ChatGPT has faced multiple interruptions, including a notable one in December 2024 that occurred shortly after the launch of its Apple Intelligence integration, and another global outage in June 2025 that lasted over three hours, affecting millions of users.
The outages also come amid growing competition in the AI assistant space.
As of the latest counts, ChatGPT had over 1 billion weekly active users, Claude was estimated to have around 300 million monthly active users, and Grok had about 117 million monthly active users as of March 2026.
Web traffic estimates from June 2025 indicated that ChatGPT controlled nearly 80% of the generative AI market. By August 2025, Gemini and Grok were beginning to make significant progress, while data from May 2026 showed ChatGPT losing some traffic share to its competitors.