The near-simultaneous breakdown of three marquee AI services underscored a growing dependency on a small group of platforms. All recovered, but the companies offered no shared explanation for why their outages overlapped.

Reports of trouble began Thursday morning, when Downdetector showed ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok unavailable at the same time. Outages are routine in tech; three leading chatbots failing together is not, particularly as AI tools become embedded in everyday work and searches. Reports also pointed to possible Gemini issues, though Google did not confirm an outage.¹

Grok appears to have been hit first, with problems across Android, iOS and the web beginning around 9:30 a.m. ET. Users who tried the chatbot through X were told: “This model is overloaded right now. Please try again shortly or pick a different model.”²

By about 11 a.m. ET, ChatGPT was returning errors. OpenAI’s own status page cited “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex,” while the disruption spread beyond ordinary chats to logins, uploads, voice mode, search, deep research and image generation. The timing was especially awkward: the company was teasing Astra, a new AI model.

Claude, Claude Code and Anthropic’s API also went down in the same window. Anthropic staff member CJ Avilla attributed the partial outage to an “infrastructure issue,” and the company said it had resolved the problem by roughly 12:15 p.m. ET. xAI subsequently restored Grok, and ChatGPT also returned online.

That sequence establishes a striking overlap, not a proven common cause. The companies had not publicly explained whether the incidents were connected, leaving users with a reminder that the AI race increasingly runs through a few shared points of failure.