Three of the most prominent AI chatbots went down nearly simultaneously on Thursday morning, and nobody seems to know why yet. ChatGPT started throwing error messages around 11AM ET, with OpenAI’s status page acknowledging “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.” The outage wasn’t limited to conversations either — logins, file uploads, voice mode, search, deep research, and image generation all took hits. OpenAI says it has “applied a mitigation” and is monitoring recovery, though performance remains degraded.
Anthropic’s Claude, Claude Code, and the Claude API started failing around the same time. Technical staff member CJ Avilla attributed the partial outage to an “infrastructure issue,” and the company reported resolving the problem by roughly 12:15PM ET. Grok had an even earlier start to its troubles — xAI’s chatbot began struggling across Android, iOS, and web at 9:30AM ET. Users prompting Grok on X got a blunt message: “This model is overloaded right now. Please try again shortly or pick a different model.”
The timing is conspicuous. Three competitors with entirely separate infrastructure stacks don’t typically collapse in the same 90-minute window without something systemic going on — a shared cloud provider, a common API dependency, or just a brutal coincidence. None of the companies have confirmed a connection, and The Verge’s requests for comment went unanswered at publication time. That silence leaves room for speculation, but the reality is these platforms have grown so fast that reliability remains a genuine weak point across the industry.
The outage lands at an awkward moment for OpenAI, which is actively teasing the launch of Astra, its next model. A degraded ChatGPT experience right before a major announcement isn’t ideal optics. But the bigger story might be simpler: when three major AI providers all stumble on the same morning, it’s a reminder that the infrastructure behind the AI boom is still finding its footing. These tools feel magical until they don’t work — and then they’re just error messages.
