OpenAI says ChatGPT is down right now, and it is not alone: a rare simultaneous outage took out ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, X’s Grok and, briefly, Google Gemini on Thursday night, September 3. If your AI assistant suddenly stopped answering, it was not just you.
Four AI assistants went dark at roughly the same time
User reports spiked on DownDetector shortly after 3 p.m. GMT (11 p.m. in Manila), with
around 40,000 people reporting OpenAI problems,
roughly 1,500 each for Claude and Grok, and hundreds for Gemini. OpenAI confirmed on its
status page that it was seeing elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex,
applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery. Anthropic’s status page and Grok’s
site likewise flagged elevated errors.
What makes this unusual is the timing. As 9to5Google put it,
ChatGPT, Claude and Grok being down at the same moment points to a possible shared infrastructure problem rather
than three separate failures. Outlets floated upstream cloud providers, including
Cloudflare and Azure, as suspects, but
none of the companies has confirmed a root cause. Services also looked wobbly: several users said ChatGPT came back for a
moment and then dropped again.
| Service | Operator | Status reported Sep 3 evening |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT + Codex | OpenAI | Elevated errors, mitigation applied, monitoring |
| Claude | Anthropic | Elevated errors reported |
| Grok | xAI (X) | Issues flagged on its site |
| Gemini | Hundreds of user reports; no formal outage notice |
A rough stretch for AI reliability
This is the second high-profile hiccup in days. Earlier this week, ChatGPT Work and Microsoft Outlook suffered a
separate partial outage on Monday, August 31,
hitting Plus subscribers who use Work mode. Stack it on top of a wider pattern of AI assistants wobbling and it is a
reminder that the apps many people now lean on for work and school are still young infrastructure.
It is also not the only service that gave users trouble today: Xbox Live went down earlier
for some players. Regulators are watching the space closely, too, now that the EU has placed
ChatGPT under its strictest platform rules.
What to do while ChatGPT is down
- Check the official status page, not rumors: OpenAI posts live updates at status.openai.com, Anthropic at status.claude.com.
- Beware fake outage links. Security researchers have flagged attackers abusing ChatGPT share links and fake
“ChatGPT is down” pages to push malware. Only open status updates from the companies’ own domains. - Have a backup. Try a different assistant, though know that several were affected at once tonight, or simply
wait, since outages like this are usually short.
At the time of writing OpenAI said it had applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery, so expect service to
return in waves. We will update this page if the picture changes.
