Widespread outage hits ChatGPT, Claude and Grok

On Tuesday, September 3, several of the leading artificial intelligence assistants stopped working for much of the day, affecting users around the world.

ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, and Codex, its coding tool, failed to respond for many users on the web, on mobile, and on desktop. During the same period, Claude, the chatbot developed by Anthropic, was also unreachable. The outage also hit Grok, the assistant built into the social network X: the product's developers publicly confirmed the malfunction.

An expected announcement

The outage came at a particular moment for OpenAI. According to rumors circulating online, the company could have announced, at that very time, a new model called Astra, which would mark the shift from version GPT-5.6 to the following GPT-6.

Shortly before the outage, ChatGPT's official account on X had posted a message with an image: «The stars are almost aligned». The message fueled speculation about a link between the outage and an imminent announcement, although none of the companies involved gave an official explanation for the cause of the disruption.

9to5Mac, one of the first outlets to report on the case, said it would update the article with any new developments, a sign that the situation was still unfolding at the time of publication.

At the moment, it is unclear whether the problem had a single cause common to all three services or whether it was a case of independent outages happening at the same time. ChatGPT, Claude and Grok are among the most widely used artificial intelligence chatbots in the world, used both by individuals and by companies that have built them into their daily work tools. A simultaneous outage of this scale shows how much millions of people now depend on these services for tasks such as writing, searching for information, and programming.