Major AI assistants hit by simultaneous access problems

Several leading artificial intelligence services, including ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini, experienced access problems for some users on Thursday, with confirmed incidents affecting multiple platforms during overlapping periods.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok all showed signs of disruption during the day, while users also reported difficulties with Google’s Gemini. The scale and precise cause of the simultaneous problems were not immediately clear, and official status information varied by provider and service.

Anthropic confirmed elevated errors affecting Claude Sonnet 5, saying it began investigating the problem at 12.37pm UTC on September 3. A fix was implemented 10 minutes later and the company moved the incident into monitoring before declaring it resolved at 12.56pm UTC. Anthropic’s status page subsequently showed Claude. ai, its API and other services as operational.

xAI also acknowledged a model outage affecting the Grok Android application. Its status service said at 1.43pm UTC that it was experiencing issues with its models. Separate xAI status pages later showed Grok on the web and within X as fully operational, illustrating that the disruption was not necessarily uniform across all access points.

GitHub, which offers Grok models through Copilot, separately said availability for Grok 4.6 and Grok 4.5 had degraded because of an upstream model provider issue. That incident indicated problems were affecting at least some third-party access to xAI models as well as direct users.

ChatGPT users reported failures to load conversations, receive answers or use some functions. OpenAI’s public status history showed that an earlier incident affecting ChatGPT Work Mode had produced high error rates shortly after midnight UTC. OpenAI said it investigated that problem from 12.04am and declared all affected services recovered by 12.10am.

Later on Thursday, however, users in several regions again encountered problems with ChatGPT. The company’s main status page subsequently displayed its systems as fully operational and said it was not aware of ongoing issues at the time checked, suggesting that availability was fluctuating or that some failures had cleared before they were reflected as a continuing platform-wide incident.

Gemini users also reported intermittent access difficulties during the same broad period. Unlike the confirmed Claude and Grok incidents, however, there was no equivalent official Google service notice located that established a platform-wide Gemini outage. The reports therefore point to problems affecting some users, but do not by themselves demonstrate that Google’s AI service suffered the same type or scale of disruption.

The overlap attracted attention because the four assistants are among the most widely used consumer and business generative AI products. ChatGPT is operated by OpenAI, Claude by Anthropic, Gemini by Google and Grok by xAI. They rely on separate model infrastructure and cloud systems, so simultaneous user complaints do not necessarily indicate a common technical failure.

No provider had identified a shared cause linking the reported problems. Service interruptions can arise from model capacity constraints, software deployments, authentication failures, networking problems or dependencies on third-party infrastructure, but none of those possibilities had been established as the explanation for Thursday’s cross-platform disruption.

The incidents also differed in duration and scope. Anthropic published a short timeline for its Claude Sonnet 5 errors and marked the matter resolved within about 20 minutes. xAI confirmed model issues on Android, while other Grok endpoints were later shown as available. OpenAI’s status record documented the earlier Work Mode issue, but its main status page later indicated normal operations.

Crowdsourced outage-monitoring data also showed clusters of complaints during the disruption window, although such services measure user reports rather than independently verifying the underlying fault. A surge in complaints can reflect a genuine platform problem, a regional network issue or repeated reports prompted by publicity. For that reason, the providers’ own incident notices offered the strongest evidence of confirmed faults, while Gemini’s status remained less clearly established overall.



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