Three AI providers went dark together for up to 3h 35m on September 3 — and it hit APIs and developer tools, not just chat

Asked:“find the downdetector frame for yesterday, which of the global ai providers went down and how long? were it just chats or apis and routers?”

Evidence from about 150 status-page records and news reports covering September 3, 2026 (scanned September 4). Confirmed overlapping outages: xAI/Grok (3h 35m), Anthropic/Claude (2h 50m), and OpenAI/ChatGPT (2h 12m on the status page, with a 34-minute acute unavailability window). Times below are Eastern Daylight Time.

OpenAIAnthropicxAIlighter segment = OpenAI's 34-minute acute unavailability inside the longer status-page window

Downdetector's crowdsourced report spikes tracked these windows closely, but every bar above is drawn from the provider's own status record and confirmed reporting — not from user reports alone.

Not just chats. OpenAI's incident spanned ~15 ChatGPT components plus the Compliance API and Codex web, API, CLI and VS Code extension; OpenAI blamed a routing error — internal routing, with no verified OpenRouter outage found. computerworld.com

Anthropic's hit covered the API surface too — claude.ai, the Claude API, Claude Code and Claude Cowork across multiple models; it called the cause an infrastructure issue without naming the system. decrypt.co

xAI's outage traced to physical infrastructure: SpaceXAI apologized for an outage at its Memphis compute center that took down Grok on X, web, mobile and both US API regions for about three and a half hours. wired.com

Downstream ripple: Cursor reported service degradation across all Grok models, automations, cloud agents and review agents, tied to upstream failures; Gemini and Copilot drew user-report spikes only, while Perplexity and DeepSeek stayed up. cryptonews.net

Provider matrix — what was down, where, and how sure we are

Provider / service	Confidence	Window (ET) & duration	Chat / web / mobile	API / developer tools	Routing / infrastructure	Cause & source
OpenAI — ChatGPT, Codex	Confirmed	10:43 am – 12:55 pm · 2h 12m (acute 34 min, 10:43–11:17)	ChatGPT web/app, login, voice, search, image gen	Compliance API, Codex web/API/CLI/VS Code	Internal routing error; no verified OpenRouter outage	Routing error, per OpenAI · ocala.com
Anthropic — Claude	Confirmed	9:26 am – 12:16 pm · 2h 50m	claude.ai, app	Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Cowork	Infrastructure issue, system not named	Infrastructure issue · statusisdown.com
xAI / SpaceXAI — Grok	Confirmed	9:30 am – 1:05 pm · 3h 35m	Grok on X, web, iOS/Android	US East & West APIs	Compute-center outage	Memphis compute center · tech.yahoo.com
Cursor	Partial / narrow	During the overlap; exact duration not established	—	Grok models, automations, cloud agents, Grok bot & review agents	Upstream provider failures	Degradation tied to upstream Claude/Grok · status.cursor.com
Google Gemini	Partial / narrow	Downdetector bump from ~8:44–8:50 am; no reliable duration	User reports only; no incident on Google's main dashboard	AI Studio / Gemini API degraded for recently created API keys, incl. OpenAI-compatible libraries	—	Narrow API-key issue · nypost.com
Microsoft Copilot	User reports only	No firm official window	User-reported issues	—	—	No confirmed incident · statusisdown.com
Perplexity, DeepSeek	Unaffected	—	Operational	Operational	—	No issues reported · gizmodo.com

Scan conducted 2026-09-04 using live web search across official status pages (status.openai.com, status.claude.com, status.x.ai, status.cursor.com, Google dashboards) and independent reporting; ~150 evidence rows across six result sets. The timeline shows provider-confirmed windows in Eastern Daylight Time; Downdetector data is crowdsourced user reports and is treated as corroboration, not confirmation. Minor same-day micro-incidents (e.g., a 19-minute Claude Sonnet blip, an 8-minute early Claude issue) were cut for space. Unconfirmed reports are never labeled as confirmed outages.

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