AI Titans Crumble: What’s Causing the Sudden Shutdown of ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude?
Ever wonder what happens when the brainy bots we rely on all day suddenly throw a digital tantrum? Well, on Thursday afternoon, it seems the global AI gang — ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Elon Musk’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini — all decided to take an unscheduled break, leaving tens of thousands scratching their heads and refreshing screens like it’s a national sport. With OpenAI juggling everything from ChatGPT conversations to image generation, and Anthropic battling performance hiccups, it’s almost like these fancy algorithms have unionized for a coffee break. Makes you think: can we really trust an army of tireless AI that collectively just goes “nah, not today”? Maybe it’s a subtle reminder that, for all their genius, even AIs are just as prone to the occasional “oops” as the rest of us mere mortals. Curious about what sparked this synchronized digital snooze fest? LEARN MORE.
Global artificial intelligence services are experiencing major outages according to users.
Those who use ChatGPT and parent company OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, Elon Musk and X’s Grok, and Google Gemini have reported issues on Thursday afternoon (3 September).
The artificial intelligence issue was reported on DownDetector shortly after 3pm BST, with 40,000 users clocking OpenAI services not working as expected.
“It came back up and now it’s not working again for me,” one user wrote.
Claude has roughly 1,500 problems reported in the same timeframe, with Elon Musk’s Grok reporting a similar number.
Google Gemini issues in the hundreds have been noted on DownDetector.
Gemini is down (Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In updates to users, OpenAI said: “We are investigating the issue for the listed services.”
This was followed by the company saying it had ‘applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery’.
According to OpenAI’s status page, the following services are impacted: Conversations, Login, ChatGPT Work, Codex in ChatGPT Desktop, Compliance API, Search, File uploads, Voice mode, GPTs, Image Generation, Deep Research, Agent, ChatGPT Atlas, Sites, and Connectors/Apps.
The outage comes shortly after the AI firm confirmed its next major AI model, Astra, is being released soon.
Anthropic, which runs Claude, said via its status page that the following services are impacted: Mythos/Fable 5.1, Mythos/Fable 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8 and Opus 4.6.
The company said it was ‘continuing to work on a fix for this issue’ before adding ‘we still experiencing degraded performance’ in an update shortly before 5pm.
In a follow up update shortly before 4pm, Anthropic said: “The only affected models right now are Opus 4.8 and Opus 5. The rest of the models have recovered to baseline error rate.”
Claude is down (Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The Google AI Studio status page reported that its Gemini API had been encoutring problems serving recently created API keys, including through OpenAI-compatible libraries.
The issue hit all services at roughly the same time on Thursday afternoon, with speculation growing as to how and why such a co-ordinated outage could have occurred.
As more and more companies across the world rely on artificial intelligence to operate, this latest outage highlights the issues that come with using the technology instead of human workers.
Although we’ve long been warned about AI replacing us at our jobs, since the technology doesn’t need paying, sick leave or paternity leave, there’s also little chance that an entire human workforce would simultaneously stop working, so anyone trusting in AI too much is seemingly always going to be taking that risk.
As long as it isn’t in control of anything too important, like public transport or keeping planes in the sky, we might just manage.
The timing of the ChatGPT outage generated additional speculation because OpenAI had been teasing what appeared to be an upcoming announcement.
On September 3, OpenAI posted on X: “The stars are almost aligned.”
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