A new report from Ookla indicates that AI platform outages rose sharply in early 2026 as growing enterprise adoption and heavier workloads exposed reliability issues across the full infrastructure stack.
The research analyzed 471 days of US Downdetector data from January 1, 2025, to April 16, 2026. Specifically, the study tracked user-reported problems across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, recording a total of 3.7 million issues.
Analyzing the Scale of AI Platform Outages
According to Ookla analyst Luke Kehoe, high-signal disruption days rose from six across four major apps in the first quarter of 2025 to 51 in the first quarter of 2026. Notably, a high-signal disruption day is defined as when a service records more than 10 times its own median daily report volume.
This surge in AI platform outages highlights the challenges of scaling infrastructure to meet rapid user demand. Meanwhile, the failure points now span far beyond model serving to include feature gates, GPU fleets, developer APIs, login systems, and demand-management policies.
Claude and Gemini Experience Volatility
Anthropic’s Claude model accounted for 39 of the 51 high-signal disruption days, making it the clearest example of scale-up volatility. In the first quarter of 2026, Claude generated 314,996 reports, with March volume alone reaching nearly three times the level recorded in February.
This pattern was clustered around demand surges, model-release windows, and platform instability as Claude Code and Cowork usage scaled. Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini saw its high-signal disruption days rise from zero in the first quarter of 2025 to seven in the first quarter of 2026.
ChatGPT Shows Reliability Improvements
OpenAI’s ChatGPT produced the largest individual disruption signals in absolute terms, including approximately 68,000 reports on December 2, 2025. However, its underlying reliability trend improved, with monthly median daily report volume falling from a peak of 2,157 in April 2025 to 1,166 in April 2026.
This improvement occurred even as OpenAI reported more than 900 million weekly active users and rapid growth in Codex usage. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Copilot recorded three high-signal disruption days, showing fewer reports on weekends, which reflects its enterprise-aligned use.
Cloud Infrastructure Failures Impact Services
The report also highlighted how cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity resilience directly contribute to AI platform outages. For instance, an AWS DynamoDB DNS event on October 20, 2025, generated more than 315,000 US reports.
Additionally, Microsoft’s Azure Front Door incident on October 29, 2025, produced nearly 96,000 reports. Consequently, these incidents illustrate how failures in cloud control planes can cascade into broader service disruptions for end users.
