ChatGPT, Claude and Grok Hit by Confirmed Outages

Three AI Platforms Offline at Once

ChatGPT, the chatbot made by OpenAI, went down alongside two rival services, Anthropic's Claude and Grok, the chatbot built by Elon Musk's social network X. All three confirmed the problems on their own status dashboards, 9to5Google reported.

Cursor, an AI coding agent, also confirmed an outage, which it attributed to the Grok and Claude failures. 9to5Google noted that AI outages are not unusual on their own, but that having all three of these platforms down at the same moment stood out.

Google's Gemini appeared to be working normally. 9to5Google said user reports about Gemini rose at around the same time, but that Google did not confirm any outage.

Sponsored

Travel eSIMNew York CityGet connected

A Possible Common Cause

According to 9to5Google, the shared root of the problem may lie with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing service, which was also drawing a raised number of outage reports.

All three affected platforms use Azure for cloud services, the publication said, although they also use other providers, including Google. Neither Microsoft nor the AI companies have confirmed a link, and the cause has not been established.

Scale of the Reports

The Asbury Park Press, citing the outage tracking site Downdetector, reported more than 12,000 reports about OpenAI shortly before 11 a.m. on a Thursday morning, with about 85 percent of the complaints relating to ChatGPT specifically.

That publication said the problems began around 10:30 a.m. and that there was no timetable for a fix. It is not yet known when full service was restored.

An Earlier Failure at ChatGPT Work

Days before, on Monday 31 August 2026, OpenAI and Microsoft both reported separate outages, CNBC said. OpenAI reported roughly three hours of elevated errors and latency on ChatGPT Work, its enterprise AI agent, telling users on its status page that people across multiple subscription plans might be unable to start or continue tasks.

Microsoft said users might see degraded functionality in Exchange Online and that it was reviewing service telemetry to isolate the source. CNBC said there were no reports that the two outages were connected.

By 2:24 p.m. Eastern that day, Downdetector showed over 1,100 reports for OpenAI products and close to 4,600 for Microsoft Outlook, both having peaked slightly earlier. CNBC noted OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work in July as a competitor to Anthropic's Claude Cowork, and that Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, now competes with it on several fronts.