Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
Summary
On Thursday morning, AI chatbots from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI all experienced outages (periods when services were unavailable) around the same time. OpenAI attributed its issue to a routing error (a problem directing user requests to the correct servers) and deployed a solution within about 34 minutes, while Anthropic identified and fixed its cause, and xAI blamed an outage at its Memphis data center. The simultaneous outages raised questions about whether they shared a common cause, but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic confirmed a connection to any third-party service provider.
Solution / Mitigation
OpenAI: 'A solution was successfully implemented' around 8:17 am PT on Thursday, September 3. Anthropic: 'A fix has been deployed' after the company identified the cause; the issue was marked as resolved by 9:16 am PT. xAI: 'We have resolved the situation, and traffic is healthy again' as of 10:05 am PT.
Classification
Affected Vendors
Related Issues
Original source: https://www.wired.com/story/nobody-is-saying-why-openai-and-anthropic-had-outages-today/
First tracked: September 3, 2026 at 08:00 PM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 92%