South Africans experienced challenges using Anthropic's Claude, Google Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and X's Grok on Thursday, 3 September 2026.
South Africans experienced challenges using Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and X’s Grok on Thursday, 3 September 2026.
While Claude was accessible, it frequently produced errors when responding to user prompts, and ChatGPT’s website was frequently unreachable.
Although its site has come back online, ChatGPT was not always responding to users’ prompts, and when it did, it often took a long time to answer.
OpenAI’s status page initially showed the service as fully operational. However, its status tracker, which uses green for optimal, yellow to indicate issues, and red to indicate an outage, showed red.
The status page was later updated to say OpenAI was aware of elevated error rates across ChatGPT and Codex, adding that it had applied mitigation and was monitoring recovery.
Meanwhile, the Claude platform is accessible to South African users. However, it frequently produces an error or takes a while to respond to user prompts.
Claude’s status page showed elevated error rates across multiple models. It said the issues began at around 15:26 South African time.
“We are investigating elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5. We will provide an update as soon as possible,” Anthropic said.
It provided an update roughly 25 minutes later, in which it said more models were impacted, including: Mythos/Fable 5.1, Mythos/Fable 5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8, and Opus 4.6.
Its latest update came at 16:49 South African time, when Anthropic said it was continuing to work on a fix for the issues.
X has acknowledged issues with Grok. Its status page indicated that the AI’s models were experiencing an outage.
“Grok is experiencing issues. We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible,” a notice on the status page said.
These issues coincided with a spike in outage reports for these platforms on the outage-reporting platform Downdetector.co.za.
The surge in outage reports related to Anthropic began around 15:00 on Thursday, 3 September, peaking at 15:45 before declining slightly. It ticked up again at 17:30.
Reports of issues with X’s Grok also began at around 15:00. There were also reports of issues with Google’s Gemini. However, they appear to be far less severe.
The spike in reports of issues with OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the steepest. Users started reporting issues at around 16:30 and the volume of complaints escalated rapidly.
