Eyewitness News (South Africa) reported on 4 September 2026 that ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini users experienced disruption in the same window. It is a regional news report, and we are not aware of any joint postmortem; the shared cause, if any, is unconfirmed.
What the report says
- Affected were ChatGPT and Codex, Claude.ai, Claude Code and the Anthropic API, and Grok; Gemini users reported timeouts and errors.
- It began around 5 pm South African time and was mostly resolved by about 7 pm.
- OpenAI cited a routing error, Anthropic a partial infrastructure outage, and Grok's downtime was attributed to an outage at a data centre.
What to build in
- A fallback path: a second provider or a smaller local model for essential functions.
- Graceful degradation: when AI is unavailable, the workflow queues the item or hands it to a person.
- Timeouts and circuit breakers, so a slow provider does not stall everything.
- Model names and endpoints in configuration, with tested alternates.
Test the fallback. A backup you have never used is a hypothesis.