Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today
OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI experienced simultaneous service outages on Thursday, raising questions about potential shared infrastructure dependencies. While OpenAI attributed its downtime to a routing error, the other companies provided limited details, despite a known compute partnership between Anthropic and xAI with SpaceX.
Why it matters
The simultaneous failure of multiple frontier AI models highlights the fragility of centralized compute infrastructure and the potential systemic risks posed by shared dependencies in the AI industry.
Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from “an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.”
The issues initially appeared to be linked because they coincided—perhaps the result of a shared third-party service provider—but neither OpenAI nor Anthropic cited an external source in comments to WIRED on Thursday. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But the company said as part of its public comments on Thursday: “We’d also like to apologize to our impacted compute partners.” Anthropic and xAI announced a “compute partnership” with SpaceX in May.
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