OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI chatbots all went down Thursday morning. OpenAI blamed a routing error, while xAI cited a Memphis compute center outage.
Anthropic did not explain its partial outage.
No shared cause was identified.
What happened
Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all suffered rare outages on Thursday morning, taking down their chatbots. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex were unavailable for some users starting around 7:43 am PT, with a fix in place by about 8:17 am PT. Anthropic reported a partial outage from 6:23 am PT, resolved by 9:16 am PT, while xAI's Grok went down at 6:30 am PT and was restored by 10:05 am PT.
Why it matters
The simultaneous timing initially suggested a shared third-party cause, but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source. Notably, Anthropic and xAI announced a compute partnership with SpaceX in May, and SpaceX, xAI's parent, apologized to its compute partners for the Memphis outage. Major infrastructure players like Cloudflare, AWS, and Microsoft Azure reported no issues, leaving the root cause unclear.
What to watch
Whether the outages point to a hidden dependency or a specific infrastructure weakness. Anthropic mentioned issues with Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5, while Claude Sonnet 5 briefly had similar problems. Google Gemini also had scattered outage reports, but Google did not confirm any incident.
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The simultaneous outages across three major AI providers on Thursday morning are notable because they defy the usual explanation for such events. When multiple services fail at once, the typical culprit is a shared cloud provider or content delivery network, but none of the major infrastructure players reported issues. OpenAI pointed to a routing error, while xAI blamed its own compute center in Memphis. Anthropic remained silent on the root cause. This raises the question of whether these companies' AI models rely on a fragile shared layer that isn't yet visible to outsiders. The fact that Anthropic and xAI had announced a compute partnership with SpaceX in May adds a layer of intrigue, though xAI's apology to its compute partners suggests the issue was on its end. For business users who depend on these chatbots, the outages serve as a reminder that even the most advanced AI services can be unexpectedly interrupted, and the lack of a clear common cause means similar incidents could happen again without warning.
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