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On Thursday, three major chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok — all went down without warning.
The simultaneous outage of three flagship from AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don’t know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time, Wired reports. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.
Only OpenAI has responded to journalists’ requests for comment.
“A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms,” a spokesperson told multiple outlets. “As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.”
Not all of each providers’ models were affected. Anthropic, for instance, said that only Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 were down, while Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI reported widespread outages.
One possible explanation is that there was an issue with their shared provider, Cloudflare. But when The Register raised this to the company, it insisted its services were doing fine.
“Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time,” a spokesperson told the publication. “Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect.”
The publication noted that Microsoft’s Azure, another major cloud provider, didn’t appear to be suffering any technical difficulties either.
Another possible culprit could be SpaceXAI. The company formerly known as xAI before being rolled into Musk’s rocket company SpaceX boasts a huge glut of computing power with its massive Colossus data centers near Memphis, and selling this to its direct rivals has become a multibillion dollar stream of revenue. Anthropic is one of those customers; the two companies announced a “compute partnership” in May.
The same afternoon that the major AI models went down, SpaceXAI issued a statement on social media that made passing reference to being partially responsible for the widely experienced outage.
“We are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,” SpaceXAI wrote on Thursday. “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.”
Technical difficulties at its data centers would explain why SpaceXAI’s own chatbot, Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude went down together. But that leaves out OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Is it merely a coincidence that it suffered a “routing error” at the same time as its competitors on a different platform? We still can’t say.
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I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
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