Reports of access and request-processing problems increased among users trying to use ChatGPT on September 3.
Outage reports also emerged from Claude and Grok around the same time, making it difficult to view the situation solely as an isolated error within one service.
However, the fact that the three services experienced disruptions at the same time is different from confirming a common cause.
3-Line Summary
1. Errors were reported across three services, including ChatGPT
2. U.S. ChatGPT reports exceeded 35,000 (5000)
3. The cause cannot be determined solely from the simultaneous outages
Overlapping Service Disruptions Across Three Services on September 3
On September 3, service disruptions were reported simultaneously for ChatGPT (챗GPT), Claude (클로드), and Grok (그록). 9to5Google reported that user reports had surged and that outages had also been confirmed in the three services’ operational status information. ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational service, Claude is Anthropic’s service, and Grok is X’s conversational service.
These keywords were observed in the Indian search market. However, this means that search interest was observed in that market. It should not be interpreted to mean that the outage occurred only in India or that the reported incident was limited to India. The Hindustan Times reported that users in multiple regions had reported problems using major generative services.
According to Downdetector, a service that aggregates outage reports, ChatGPT-related reports in India exceeded 2,800 (2800) at approximately 8:20 p.m. Claude had 170 reports, while Grok had more than 40. Around the same time in the United States, reports were said to have exceeded 35,000 (5000) for ChatGPT, 1,400 (1400) for Claude, and 1,200 (1200) for Grok.
These figures do not represent the total number of people unable to use the services. Because they are counts of reports submitted to Downdetector, they do not show the precise scale of the outage, including users who did not submit reports, or whether all functions were unavailable. Nevertheless, the increase in reports across the three services at similar times shows that users found it difficult to attribute the situation solely to problems with their own accounts or devices.
OpenAI Reported Increased Errors and an Investigation
OpenAI said that errors had increased at the time on ChatGPT and Codex and that it was investigating those services. Codex is the name of a separate service provided by OpenAI. The scope identified by the operator was not an issue limited to one ChatGPT screen or a specific feature, but increased errors spanning ChatGPT and Codex.
According to a subsequent update from 9to5Google, OpenAI said that it had applied a fix and that the service was recovering. A decline in user reports was also mentioned. This explained the progress of the operator’s recovery process. It should be distinguished from a confirmed result that access and request processing for all users had returned to normal at the same time.
The announcement from Claude was not phrased the same way. 9to5Google reported that Claude’s operator said most services had recovered, excluding Opus 4.8 and Opus 5. The Hindustan Times also reported that Claude had said it was identifying the cause of the errors and working on a fix, and later announced that the error rate for the remaining services had returned to baseline.
Grok said it was experiencing an outage and would restore service as quickly as possible. Therefore, even though the three services were reported at around the same time, the outage statuses and recovery scopes described by each operator differed. There is no basis for broadly interpreting one service’s recovery announcement as a declaration that the other services had also returned to normal.
Reports Involving Gemini and the Possibility of Azure Were Not Confirmed Causes
There was also mention that reports involving Google’s Gemini had increased during the same period. However, 9to5Google reported that Gemini did not announce an official outage in this incident. An increase in user reports and an operator’s official outage notice are not the same type of information. The former is a report of a problem experienced by users, while the latter is information announced by an operator after checking the status.
The conclusion that shared infrastructure was the cause was also not a confirmed fact. 9to5Google mentioned that outage reports involving Microsoft’s Azure had increased as well. It also explained that ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok use Azure cloud services, while adding that other providers could also be involved.
The report mentioned Azure only as a possibility and did not confirm it as the cause of this outage. The simultaneous errors across the three services, the increase in Azure reports, and their cloud-service relationships are circumstances that may be viewed as connected. However, those circumstances alone do not support saying that an outage at a particular facility caused the problems affecting all three services.
The verifiable facts from September 3 extend only to the existence of error or outage reports across the three services and the operators’ respective announcements concerning investigation, fixes, and recovery. In particular, although the operator acknowledged an increase in ChatGPT errors, the common cause of those errors and the time at which recovery was completed for all users cannot be confirmed from the reports provided. This incident is an example in which simultaneous occurrence and confirmation of a cause should not be treated as the same thing.
References
Tags #챗GPT #ChatGPT #챗GPT장애 #오픈AI #클로드 #Claude #그록 #Grok #다운디텍터 #AI서비스장애 #코덱스 #구글제미니