Multiple AI programs, including ChatGPT, hit with outages

On Thursday morning, AI chatbots Claude, ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and xAI's Grok all experienced widespread outages. These popular AI services, relied upon by many, including for work purposes, abruptly shut down around 9:30 a.m. ET according to reports on Downdetector. The source of the issue remains unclear, but developers and users have speculated on potential causes.

CJ Avilla, a developer for Anthropic, suggested on X that infrastructure problems were to blame for the Claude service disruptions. He later reported that the issues had been resolved. Attempts to reach representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI for comment were unsuccessful. As of the publication, ChatGPT and Claude AI services were operational once again, as confirmed by their respective status pages. xAI's Grok and Google's cloud services also appeared to be back online.

The occurrence of simultaneous outages among multiple AI services is uncommon, and may indicate underlying infrastructure issues, as noted by TradingKey. Such interdependencies could lead to cascading failures when one service experiences problems. Attributed to Avilla, infrastructure issues could potentially point towards troubles with cloud service providers such as Amazon or Microsoft.

While no company has explicitly confirmed a common root cause, Microsoft Azure problems were noted to coincide with the AI service outages, possibly playing a role, as reported by Quartz.