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When the frontier models of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceXAI experience outages and the resultant downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots occur almost simultaneously, it is time that we bandied around at least a few conspiracy theories. Instead, we got folks on social media wondering if those incapacitated by the shutdown sought “brains on rent”.
The outage happened Thursday morning (Pacific Time) and initially appeared to be interlinked because the timings coincided. The first instinct was to blame a third-party provider for the outage, but the fact remains that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic blamed any external agency for the issue.
On its part, SpaceX said the issue with Grok was a result of an “outage at the Memphis compute centre” which Anthropic almost immediately picked up and amplified with their own comment that they would “also like to apologise to our impacted compute partners.” The Claude-maker and the Rocket-maker had entered a “compute partnership” in May.
Among the three (we were given to understand earlier that even Google’s Gemini was down) OpenAI actually opened up more than the others. Spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski said it was a “routing error” that caused ChatGPT and Codex to go offline for some users across multiple platforms. And it took them just 30 minutes to fix the issue.
Per a report published by The Wired, Anthropic did not respond to the episode directly but did start alerting about a “partial outage” about a half hour before the timelines shared by OpenAI. It claimed “elevated errors” on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1 and a few others and noted that the cause had been identified and a fix deployed immediately.
Grok’s reporting happened earlier to the other two when the company posted a note on its status page about “investigating outage” and informing users that they were working on restoring the service as quickly as possible. The resolution was posted about three hours later. In fact, the interesting point here is that all outage start timings were different, but the resolution timings were weirdly close to each other.
Reports of a possible outage of Gemini too surfaced but the company did not confirm this nor did they record any incidents on the services dashboard. What was a matter of concern is that multiple outages in the same sector around the same time is often associated to a malfunction at the cloud provider’s end or a third-party vendor’s issues. What’s more, neither Cloudflare, nor AWS or Microsoft Azure reported any outage.
In fact, a report published by The Register actually noted that they reached out to Cloudflare which promptly confirmed that they weren’t experiencing any significant service disruptions at the time. “Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect,” they said.
Could SpaceX’s Memphis datacentre be the culprit? If so, why didn’t it affect Gemini as Google too has outsource compute power from Elon Musk. In the absence of clear answers, we can only assume that it was the handiwork of The Lord who wanted humans to retain some of their cognitive abilities, at least for a little longer (as one user put it on social media).
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