Coincidence: Unlikely
September 7, 2026
On September 3, 2026, something interesting seems to have taken place. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google learned that their AI systems experience a digital heart failure. The hearts began beating again, but the leadership of these firms had a headache, and I am not sure it has gone away.
Ars Technica said in “Four Major AI Models Suffer Rare Overlapping Downtime. Service Interruptions Hit ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini Practically Simultaneously.” How about this for a velvet glove observation?
While the affected frontier models go down occasionally, having all four experience interruptions in the same short period is practically unheard of. Claude reports 99.4 percent uptime for its services over the last 90 days and last reported a similar three-hour “partial outage” on August 24. OpenAI reports 99.63 percent uptime for ChatGPT and 100 percent uptime for ChatGPT Codex in the same period. ChatGPT’s so-called “Work Mode” reported an hours-long period of “elevated latency” on August 31.
Computerworld in “ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok All Went Down at Once; Enterprises Need a Backup Plan” stated:
…on Thursday, as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and SpaceXAI’s Grok near-simultaneously, and somewhat mysteriously, experienced significant, prolonged outages.
Yep, mysterious.
Let’s stop and ask a handful of questions not addressed in these two cited write ups:
- What happened to the cloud providers and their systems? Don’t infrastructure operators have smart software tuned to identify and fail over immediately? Everyone’s favorite BAIT (big AI tech company) outfit not only owns its vertical stack, the firm owns a couple of state-of-the-art cyber security systems. What went wrong in the engineering, design, and implementation of these smart defense mechanisms? I think I know the answer. A lawyer will help craft a plausible deniability statement or tell the clients with the problematic system, “Keep you lip zipped.”
- What about the tech bloggers and YouTube experts? Where are those deep dives into the technical issues that caused for BAITs to go south at approximately the same time? (Is it possible that analyses have been posted and remain unindexed in order to convert the story into the information equivalent of a squirrel dashing into a roadway only to be squished by a Ford F-150’s front tire?)
- What are the BAIT ourfits saying? Yeah, not much, right? Does the cat have your PR departments tongue?
I haven’t been in a statistics class in more than half a century. The idea that four unrelated companies’ smart software glitches at about the same time on the same day seems unlikely. Is there an undisclosed or previously unknown dependency sparking this dumpster fire? Did an outside actor send a signal to test the efficacy of its “kill US AI services” switch? I can think of a couple of countries who might have explored developing such a software device.
I used the free pen I snagged at the Staunton, Virginia, Comfort24 Hotel. I roughed out some numbers. I recast these into one of my analogies. For four unrelated AI firms to experience an outage at roughly the same time on the same day of the week is like a public park with four kid-oriented merry go rounds rotating 24 hours a day. Each merry go rounds dumps kids off. The chance that I could look at the four rotating merry go rounds and see each of the four dumping a kid simultaneously is about one in 6,000,000. For me, the coincidence is sufficiently improbable to say, “Yo, we have a shared dependency or we have a bad actor testing a kill switch.”
In my typical dinobaby fashion, I wish to offer a few observations. [a] Sheer chance is unlikely to produce this type of event. [b] A bad actor working from a position with tools that permits a kill actio to occur seems worth considering. [c] The baloney about security and reliability needs a footnote to two to allay the concerns of suspicious individuals like me.
Net net: We just received a signal. Who will stand up and say, “Okay, folks this is what really happened.” Tip: Don’t hold your breath.
Stephen E Arnold, September 7, 2026
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More interesting was the lack of news about the outage. Almost like these things aren’t quite as critical as they make themselves out to be? Everybody got along fine…
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