ChatGPT and Claude Face Disruptions in Widespread AI Outage If you attempted to interact with an AI chatbot this afternoon and encountered errors, you were part of a significant service disruption. Both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude experienced partial outages, leaving many users unable to access the services. The issues with ChatGPT began earlier today, with user reports on outage tracking sites surging to over twelve thousand at the peak of the problem. OpenAI quickly acknowledged the situation, posting a status update that cited elevated error rates affecting both the standard ChatGPT interface and its developer platform. The company worked to resolve the core service disruption, marking it as fixed by 5:14 PM Eastern Time. While the main ChatGPT service was restored, OpenAI continued to list an active alert for a specific component of its API related to fine-tuning. However, the company indicated that a fix had been implemented and that systems were in the process of recovering. The outage was not isolated to OpenAI. Its competitor, Anthropic, also faced technical difficulties with its Claude AI models. Anthropic’s status page reported an elevated error rate across the API for all Claude models. This separate incident was resolved earlier in the day, by approximately 1:00 PM Eastern Time. These simultaneous outages highlight the growing reliance on a small group of leading AI service providers and the widespread impact when their systems encounter problems. For many developers, businesses, and individual users, these tools have become integral to daily workflows, making such disruptions immediately noticeable. Both companies have since resolved their primary service issues. Users who continue to experience problems are likely encountering residual effects or the specific, narrower API issue noted by OpenAI. The incidents serve as a reminder of the complex infrastructure underpinning modern generative AI and its occasional fragility.
