AI Outages Hit OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI Amid Unexplained Thursday Disruptions

Frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI suffered rare service disruptions on Thursday morning, rendering their respective chatbots temporarily inaccessible. While the simultaneous nature of the failures initially suggested a shared dependency, each company attributed the issues to distinct, internal causes.

SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, confirmed that the Grok outage stemmed from an incident at its Memphis compute center. In a statement on Thursday afternoon, SpaceX apologized to affected compute partners, acknowledging the disruption. This comes amid a “compute partnership” between xAI and Anthropic, announced in May.

OpenAI spokesperson Kathleen Chaykowski told WIRED that a routing error beginning at approximately 7:43 am PT caused ChatGPT and Codex to go down for some users. A fix was implemented by 8:17 am PT, with systems continuing to be monitored.

Anthropic, which declined to provide further comment, had reported a “partial outage” starting at 6:23 am PT involving elevated errors for Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5. The company stated it identified the cause and deployed a fix shortly thereafter, marking the issue as resolved by 9:16 am PT. Claude Sonnet 5 experienced brief similar issues around 9 am PT.

xAI reported investigating the Grok outage from 6:30 am PT, stating on its service status page that it was working to restore service as quickly as possible. By 10:05 am PT, xAI confirmed that traffic had returned to normal levels.

Reports also surfaced regarding a potential Google Gemini outage, but Google did not confirm any incidents on its service status dashboard and did not respond to requests for comment.

Industry observers noted that multiple outages across the sector often indicate problems with cloud providers, content delivery networks, or other third-party vendors. However, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited external sources, and major infrastructure providers including Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure reported no disruptions on Thursday.