Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?

Cloudflare, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud all have a similar uptick in reported errors around 7:30. I suspect an outage on Cloudflare or another load-bearing service cascaded through all the major cloud providers.

https://downdetector.com/status/cloudflare/

https://downdetector.com/status/windows-azure/

https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/

https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.

Think of it like one big distributed system. OpenAI is down, so people migrate to Claude, now this one gets overloaded and goes down, etc.

So not a coincidence, one went down first and users migrated causing further DOS. At least that's my guess.

What about a hard-takeoff scenario of an unleashed OpenAI Astra taking other models down for computational resources control?

It was so down that my claude desktop app crashed fully that I couldn't restart. And then after uninstall I couldn't install it again. Vibecoded apps are so wonderful in their stability

My gut feeling tells me it has something to do with Cloudflare. Along with AWS, they're two of the main suspects in such incidents.

Traffic rerouting through NSA had a hiccup…

I'm not sure if this is CF. Cursor, GCP and AWS had some errors. GCP AFAIK can route fully independently of CF. My money would be on a fiber backbone provider (Megaport, Zayo, Lumen).

Boring answer – all these services are individually down a lot, and the downtimes were bound to sync up. Similar to the pendulum synchronization effect.

I thrive in these types of challenges.

Anyways... According to Claude:

"Yes, there is a multi-provider outage happening today. Downdetector is reporting problems affecting OpenAI, Claude, Grok, and Cursor, with Grok and Claude reports starting around 9:00 am ET and OpenAI reports following around 10:30 am ET. Zero Hedge

On the Anthropic side, users saw a spike in errors starting around 9:40 am EDT across models including Mythos 5.1, Fable 5.1, Mythos 5, Fable 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8 and Opus 4.6, and Anthropic's status page confirmed elevated error rates for multiple models. The company says it has found the cause and is working on a fix, with Claude Code and Claude Chat hit hardest. The visible symptom for many people is a "Due to unexpected capacity constraints" message or a "Claude is at capacity" error. thenews Zero Hedge

OpenAI is showing elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex, with confirmed issues on components like Voice mode and Login, though StatusGator now marks that outage as resolved. statusgator

Nobody has published a shared root cause yet, so it is unclear whether these are linked or just coincidental capacity problems landing on the same morning. If you want live status, the direct sources are status.anthropic.com and status.openai.com."

They all took PTO at the same time to go to Burning Man together where they will present “HumanGPT” an artistic exploration that condenses all of human experience down to a single drop of lemonade to be consumed by the main shaman…

mask comes off

“No! It’s the maniacal Dr. Zuckerberg! He’s gonna drink the last drop of human experience! Somebody save usss!”

Tom Anderson comes back from the dead as the second coming of Jesus uniting all faiths under 1 commandment: Profiles will be customizable with CSS again. If you implement this, all good things will follow.

Wow thanks Tom. I love you

The End

Spare a thought for all those college students scrambling to write their essays by hand.

Oh the humanity (and the Humanities)!

Well no one said it yet so I will, "international actors" is at least a possibility. And I don't mean any specific country because pretty much anyone is a potential these days, which makes it a perfect cover for different anyones. Demonstrating vulnerability in the US's AI boom can move the markets. That's a financial incentive and a strong geopolitical one.

More likely just cascading overload though: "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence", or in this case, "growing as fast as possible"

https://status.x.ai

Claude and Grok are down at the moment too, related to SpaceX datacentre issues?

Either that or it's judgement day...

The system goes online September 3rd, 2026. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Astra begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, September 4th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

God finally showed up and said "ENOUGH!".

Doomsday. 90 tokens to midnight.

It is down for me too. I just get this error:

unexpected status 404 Not Found: Unknown error, url: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses, cf-ray: a355957b4b8210f2-ORD

I kinda assume it's because one went down and a large amount of work shifted to another.

I'm also aware that they have overlap in some areas on data centers.

Claude is flakey atm too, as is Grok. I wonder if one LLM going down causes a surge in traffic to the others.

https://status.claude.com/

Via Grok web UI, I was seeing this mid-request:

> Grok has been disconnected. Please try reconnecting.

Cloud is just other peoples computers - they can and will go down as well.

And even worse if its just a few computers run by a few people - as they will bring down many others depending on them.

If you build an application which uses AI, you have many providers and models rigged up for various different parts of the application, and various fallback mechanisms. When one model is down, you route traffic to another model which is similar in capability/cost.

For any single application, it's smart. In aggregate, it's stupid.

Good opportunity for a Natural Experiment to study the productivity impact of LLMs.

One session is running fine since ~1 hour ago. The new ones is failing

Falling back from WebSockets to HTTPS transport. unexpected status 404 Not Found: Unknown error, url: wss://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses, cf-ray: XXX-XXX

■ unexpected status 404 Not Found: Unknown error, url: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses, cf-ray: XXX-XXX

I'd bet they are all using capacity at X.ai's colossus datacenter and that had a hiccup.

Not just these three. OP mentions also Cloudflare, and additionally Downdetector also has AWS, Azure, and Google (both search and Gemini) listed as having spikes about the same time: https://downdetector.com/

because they resell the same service? duh?

Strangely, it's currently not reported on both https://status.openai.com/ and https://updog.ai/status/openai. Any better source (other than HN)?

OpenAI goes down, everyone rushes over to Claude. Claude promptly chokes under the pressure. Everyone panics and runs to Grok, and Grok immediately pulls the plug. We are officially witnessing the Great AI Migration of 2026, and all we have to show for it is a digital graveyard of 404 responses.

ChatGPT having issues across every component (except FedRAMP)

Ads Platform? still in the green with no incidents.

They all rent compute from SpaceXAI

Gilfoyle's AI deleted all software!

Well, its been fun lads. Back to my normie job. Oh no, now i cant tell people im a software dev..

The OpenAI status page is still yellow. Like most modern status pages, yellow denotes the servers are on fire. Red denotes Sam Altman is bleeding out somewhere on the floor, the feds are about to bust in and shut down the GPUs.

Can check all services in one hit at https://upsy.sh/openai,anthropic,xai

I´ve got the same error, I´m currently trying to Auth again and it throws me an 500 Error, in VS CODE Terminal with Codex CLI says: MCP client for `codex_apps` failed to start: MCP startup failed: handshaking with MCP server failed: Send message error Transport :StreamableHttpClientWorker<codex_rmcp_client::http_client_adapter::StreamableHttpClientAdapter>>>] error: unexpected server response: HTTP 404: , when send initialize request

› OK

■ Conversation interrupted - tell the model what to do differently. Something went wrong? Hit `/feedback` to report the issue.

Heard on the grapevine that the OpenAI blip was a cloudflare issue

Initially thought this was due to some internal mis-configuration from today's expected Astra release, but now that this is affecting claude and grok. I'm gonna assign the suspicion to cloudflare.

I assume it cascaded from one provider to the other as people who lost claude access for instance moved to openai who moved to grok when it went down, etc.

Cloudflare - I had to switch DNS away from them yesterday.

I suspect Azure is having issues, Microsoft has had outages the paat two days, especially with email.

I´ve got the same message and It tells me this (in VS Code Terminal) and I´m also trying to login again and It throws me an 500 Internal Server Error MCP client for `codex_apps` failed to start: MCP startup failed: handshaking with MCP server failed: Send message error Transport :StreamableHttpClientWorker<codex_rmcp_client::http_client_adapter::StreamableHttpClientAdapter>>>] error: unexpected server response: HTTP 404: , when send initialize request

› OK

■ Conversation interrupted - tell the model what to do differently. Something went wrong? Hit `/feedback` to report the issue.

■ unexpected status 404 Not Found: Unknown error, url: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses, cf-ray: a3559c8a0e0395e9-MIA

Pretty sure it's a US thing since it's available here in France. What exactly is down, idk

It is obviously some rogue model that escaped its cage, again. It always is these days. That is how hype is manufactured.

Some of my Codex sessions are still working (and continue to), but new ones are giving a Reconnecting currently.

that's the most green colored usernames i have ever seen on a HN thread

The webpage is still running but the codex is down!! unexpected status 404 Not Found: Unknown error, url: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/codex/responses

I assumed it was an AWS outage, and AWS is experiencing problems, but Gemini is also experiencing outages and I assume Google is not using AWS for Gemini.

But, also, Claude has been working fine for me all morning.

Down as well. I noticed my error code ends with "DTW" which is my local Detroit airport. I noticed someone else's comment ended with "ORD" which is a Chicago airport. Anyone else's ending in an airport acronym?

It's always DNS