Three of the biggest names in artificial intelligence hit turbulence at the same time on September 3, 2026, when OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all reported service disruptions affecting their flagship AI products.
The timing was notable. This was not one company having a bad day. All three stumbled in overlapping windows.
What actually broke
OpenAI bore the most documented impact. At approximately 10:58 AM UTC, the company detected elevated error rates across ChatGPT and Codex, affecting 15 components on ChatGPT and 4 on Codex. Engineers applied mitigations within about 24 minutes, bringing the incident to a close by 11:22 AM. A separate, shorter ChatGPT Work Mode disruption earlier that morning lasted roughly 5 minutes before resolving on its own.
Anthropic’s issues were technically the day prior. Claude Sonnet 5 experienced elevated errors on September 2, with that incident lasting approximately 25 minutes before engineers resolved it.
