Major AI chatbots stumble: ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all offline simultaneously

Three leading AI chatbots—OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok—all faced service outages early Wednesday morning, affecting millions of users trying to access the tools.

Timeline of the disruptions#

The problems began around 11 AM Eastern Time, when ChatGPT started serving error messages to users attempting to use the platform. OpenAI's status page noted "elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex" but provided no immediate explanation for the cause.

Nearly simultaneous outages struck Claude around 10:30 AM ET. Anthropic's status dashboard initially reported that multiple model versions were impacted, though the company later narrowed the scope to affect only Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 variants.

Grok, xAI's conversational AI, experienced its own service interruption affecting both its mobile app and web interface during the same window.

Cause remains a mystery#

At press time, it was unclear whether the outages stemmed from a common underlying issue or represented separate, coincidental problems. Both OpenAI and Anthropic indicated they had implemented fixes and continued monitoring the recovery process. xAI similarly stated it was "working on restoring service as quickly as possible."

Neither company had released formal public statements explaining what triggered the disruptions, and requests for additional comment from all three organizations went unanswered in the immediate aftermath.