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Multiple major artificial intelligence platforms experienced simultaneous service disruptions on Thursday morning, prompting thousands of users to report access failures across Downdetector, the internet uptime monitoring service. Affected services included OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude—two of the most widely used generative AI applications. The near-simultaneous outages suggested a potential common infrastructure issue, though neither company immediately disclosed the root cause publicly.
The outages lasted several hours before services were progressively restored, with most platforms returning to normal operation by mid-morning. The incident underscores growing operational risk across the AI industry as these tools have rapidly scaled from niche applications to critical business infrastructure. Companies and individual users relying on these platforms for real-time workflows—from customer service to software development—face material productivity losses even during short disruptions, raising questions about redundancy and disaster recovery protocols in the sector.