Three widely used AI platforms—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok—went offline together on Thursday, September 3, 2026. The outages left large numbers of users looking for other options. Google’s Gemini did not appear to be affected.
Problems started surfacing between 9:30 and 9:40 AM EDT. Downdetector recorded sharp jumps in complaint volume for all three services. The hashtag “GrokDown” began circulating on social media around the same time.
What Each Platform Reported
OpenAI’s status page confirmed trouble with both ChatGPT and Codex.
Anthropic posted an “Investigating” notice on its status page at 13:26 UTC. Fifteen minutes later, at 13:41 UTC, the company updated the status to “Identified.” Anthropic reported elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5. The list of affected models later grew to include Mythos/Fable 5, Opus 4.8, and Opus 4.6. The disruption hit Claude AI itself, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. That meant interrupted work for everyday users as well as developers and companies that rely on the tools for coding, automation, and research.
xAI had not issued an official statement about Grok by late Thursday morning. Its status page continued to show a message saying the company was “not aware of any issues impacting Grok (Web).” StatusGator independently flagged the outage and logged 66 user reports in the prior 24 hours.
How the Outages Affected Daily Work
Users described coding sessions that stopped mid-task, automated workflows that failed, and research projects that stalled. One outage-tracking service put ChatGPT’s downtime at roughly 36 minutes. The length of the disruptions differed from platform to platform.
The timing stood out for OpenAI. The company is rumored to be preparing an announcement tied to its next model, called Astra. That release could move its models from GPT-5.6 to GPT-6.
A Pattern of Repeated Disruptions
The fact that three major services failed at once points to the operational risk of relying on any single AI provider. Grok has a documented string of outages through 2026, including one that lasted about seven and a half hours in late January. Claude has faced repeated incidents as well; StatusGator has recorded 413 outages for the service since January 2025.
As these tools shift from experimental products to everyday infrastructure, even short interruptions start to look like business-continuity problems.