On September 3, 2026, AI chatbots from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI experienced outages, leading to downtime for users. SpaceX, which is the parent company of xAI, stated that the Grok outage was due to an issue at its Memphis compute center. The outages appeared to coincide, raising speculation about a shared third-party service provider, but OpenAI and Anthropic did not confirm any external source. SpaceX did not respond to requests for further comment but acknowledged the impact on its compute partners.
OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski reported that a routing error starting at 7:43 am PT made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users. A solution was implemented by 8:17 am PT. Anthropic indicated a partial outage starting at 6:23 am PT, which involved elevated errors on requests to its Claude models. The company identified the cause and deployed a fix, marking the issue as resolved by 9:16 am PT. xAI's Grok reported outages beginning at 6:30 am PT, with the situation resolved by 10:05 am PT.
There were also unconfirmed reports of a potential Google Gemini outage on the same morning, but Google did not verify these claims. Typically, simultaneous outages in the same sector may indicate issues with a cloud provider or third-party vendor, but OpenAI and Anthropic did not cite a shared cause, and major internet infrastructure providers reported no outages on that day.