Are ChatGPT, Claude and Grok down? What users need to know

Earlier on Thursday, AI users reported disruptions while utilizing ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. This outage has affected those who used AI for various purposes, including free therapy sessions and creating caricatures. OpenAI is believed to be developing its next big model, GPT-6 Astra, which may upgrade OpenAI's models from GPT-5.6 to GPT-6.

The issue is currently impacting ChatGPT on web, mobile, and desktop platforms, with Claude and Grok experiencing similar problems. Users worldwide began noticing that ChatGPT and OpenAI's coding tool, Codex, were malfunctioning. Some users could still access their existing chats, while others couldn't create new chats or received error messages like "404 Not Found". The problem was not limited to a single user's internet connection, as reports came from multiple countries.

A 404 error indicates that an app requested information from a server, but the server couldn't find what was asked for. This error could be caused by an issue within OpenAI's systems, but a 404 message alone doesn't provide a definitive explanation for what went wrong. At roughly the same time, other major AI services, including Claude and Grok, were also reporting issues.

Various theories emerged in response to the outage, including a Cloudflare problem, an AWS or other cloud infrastructure issue, one AI service going down causing users to flood competitors with traffic, or even jokingly, the AI apocalypse beginning. However, none of these theories were confirmed.

OpenAI's official status page currently indicates that its systems are fully operational, and the status history shows that ChatGPT Work Mode experienced high error rates on Thursday. The affected services later recovered.