ChatGPT and Claude Experience Simultaneous Outage: Users Affected

Simultaneous Outage at AI Giants

Two leading services in the artificial intelligence sector, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, experienced an unexpected simultaneous outage on February 3, 2026. Thousands of users worldwide encountered problems accessing these popular chatbots. The disruptions, which hampered business processes, educational activities, and daily digital interactions, once again highlighted the central role these tools play in the modern digital ecosystem.

User Response and Resolution Process

During the outages, users reported issues such as being unable to connect to the platforms, not receiving responses, or encountering error messages. Social media platforms and technical forums were flooded with user complaints and troubleshooting suggestions. Both companies quickly identified the problem and announced they were working on a solution. Fortunately, the outages did not last long, and services gradually returned to normal within a few hours. However, even this brief period caused significant disruptions for many users and businesses.

Possible Causes and Technical Background

While the exact cause of the simultaneous outage affecting both services has not been officially disclosed, industry observers and technology experts are focusing on several possible scenarios. In the past, similar outages in ChatGPT have occurred due to server overload resulting from the rollout of new features (such as image generation capabilities). Such major updates can cause sudden spikes in user demand and unexpected stress on infrastructure.

Another possibility could be an external cyber incident or a problem originating from cloud infrastructure providers. Additionally, hardware failures in the server farms that run complex AI models can also lead to such widespread outages. The fact that two competing firms were affected simultaneously may point to a shared external dependency (such as a specific cloud region or network provider).

This incident underscores the growing reliance on a handful of centralized AI platforms and raises critical questions about service resilience and redundancy. As these tools become more deeply integrated into professional and personal workflows, the impact of even short-term unavailability increases significantly. Experts suggest that both companies will likely conduct thorough post-mortem analyses to prevent recurrence and may need to invest further in distributed and failover systems to enhance reliability for their global user base.