TL; DR
- ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok experienced widespread outages around the same time today.
- Cursor was also affected, likely because it relies on models from Anthropic and xAI.
- Gemini saw some reports of problems, but far fewer than the other major chatbots.
- Microsoft Azure is currently the leading theory for the simultaneous outages, although nothing has been confirmed.
It was a strange evening for AI users. ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all started throwing errors around the same time, leaving users unable to access the services through their websites, apps, and APIs.
The outages also affected Cursor, which relies on models from providers including Anthropic and xAI. So if Cursor suddenly stopped responding while you were working, you are not alone in this.
Gemini appears to have largely avoided the disruption. There were some reports of problems with Google’s AI chatbot too, but they were nowhere near as widespread as the complaints surrounding ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok.
Was Microsoft Azure the Cause?
The leading theory right now points to Microsoft Azure. Azure saw a spike in outage reports around the same period, and all three affected AI companies use Azure infrastructure in some capacity.
That shared dependency could explain why services from three competing AI companies experienced problems at roughly the same time. It remains a theory for now, though, and there has been no official confirmation that Azure caused the outages.
There was also some unfortunate timing around OpenAI’s new model called Astra, which follows GPT-5.6 and marks the move to GPT-6. There is no evidence connecting the model announcement to today’s outage, though the timing has naturally given people plenty of material for jokes.
The outage itself quickly became a story on X, with users joking about being forced to put their AI assistants away and “touch grass.” It also highlights how dependent many of today’s tools have become on a relatively small number of infrastructure providers.
The exact cause has not been confirmed yet. We’ll update this story if the companies provide any details.
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