US AI services suffer 4-hour outage; OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI hit

This outage underscores the concentration risk in AI infrastructure, where a single routing error can take down multiple major platforms simultaneously. The simultaneous impact on ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok highlights how dependent the AI ecosystem has become on shared network dependencies, rather than isolated failures. For enterprises and developers relying on these APIs, the event raises questions about redundancy and fallback options across providers. The fact that Zhipu remained online points to a potential divergence in infrastructure resilience between US and Chinese AI firms, which is worth watching as geopolitical tech competition intensifies.