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On Thursday, three major chatbots \u2014 ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok \u2014 all went down without warning<\/a>.<\/p>\n The simultaneous outage of three flagship from AI systems from three different providers was bizarre. But, in an exceedingly peculiar information gap, we still don\u2019t know why models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI respectively suffered outages at the same time, Wired reports<\/a>. Whatever linked the disruptions, for now, remains unclear.<\/p>\n Only OpenAI has responded to journalists\u2019 requests for comment.<\/p>\n \u201cA routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3, made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms,\u201d a spokesperson told multiple outlets. \u201cAs of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored.\u201d<\/p>\n Not all of each providers\u2019 models were affected. Anthropic, for instance, said that only Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 were down, while Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceXAI reported widespread outages.<\/p>\n One possible explanation is that there was an issue with their shared provider, Cloudflare. But when The Register raised this<\/a> to the company, it insisted its services were doing fine.<\/p>\n \u201cCloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time,\u201d a spokesperson told the publication. \u201cOur services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n The publication noted that Microsoft\u2019s Azure, another major cloud provider, didn\u2019t appear to be suffering any technical difficulties either.<\/p>\n Another possible culprit could be SpaceXAI. The company formerly known as xAI before being rolled into Musk\u2019s rocket company SpaceX boasts a huge glut of computing power with its massive Colossus data centers near Memphis<\/a>, and selling this to its direct rivals has become a multibillion dollar stream of revenue. Anthropic is one of those customers; the two companies announced<\/a> a \u201ccompute partnership\u201d in May.<\/p>\n The same afternoon that the major AI models went down, SpaceXAI issued a statement on social media that made passing reference to being partially responsible for the widely experienced outage.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are sorry for the issues you may have experienced with Grok following an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning,\u201d SpaceXAI wrote<\/a> on Thursday. \u201cWe\u2019d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.\u201d<\/p>\n Technical difficulties at its data centers would explain why SpaceXAI\u2019s own chatbot, Grok, and Anthropic\u2019s Claude went down together. But that leaves out OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. Is it merely a coincidence that it suffered a \u201crouting error\u201d at the same time as its competitors on a different platform? We still can\u2019t say.<\/p>\n