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Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today

OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI chatbots suffered brief simultaneous outages; OpenAI cited a routing error and SpaceX a Memphis compute center outage.

ChatGPT and Codex were unavailable to some users from about 7:43 to 8:17 am PT Thursday due to a routing error, per OpenAI. Anthropic reported a partial outage with elevated errors on Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5, resolved by 9:16 am PT, while declining to explain the cause. xAI attributed the Grok outage starting 6:30 am PT to an outage at SpaceX's Memphis compute center; no shared third-party infrastructure cause was confirmed despite Cloudflare, AWS, and Azure reporting no issues.

WIRED · Security · 12d agoAI industry1

CISA Urges Service Providers to Provide Transparent Updates During Major IT and OT Outages

CISA and FBI issued guidance urging service providers to deliver timely, transparent communications during major IT and OT outages.

CISA, with the FBI and international partners, released 'Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers', urging providers to prepare crisis-communication procedures, provide timely status updates during IT/OT outages, and maintain out-of-band communication channels. The guidance warns that disruptions to telecom, cloud, energy, and water services can cascade across critical infrastructure. It aligns with CISA's CI Fortify initiative supporting IT/OT isolation and recovery.

GBHackers · 5d agoAdvisory

CISA Calls for More Guidance, Less Spin, as Cyber Outages Escalate

CISA and partners issue a joint advisory pressing organizations toward transparent breach notification and incident response as cyber outages escalate.

Dark Reading reports on a new joint government advisory led by CISA that signals a regulatory shift. The advisory presses organizations to adopt more transparent breach notification protocols and incident response practices. The guidance comes as cyber outages escalate and reflects growing government expectation of disclosure over spin.

Dark Reading · 4d agoPolicy & legal1

Certificate failures can cost firms over $250,000

DigiCert survey finds certificate failures cost firms over $250,000 per incident, with 47-day TLS certificates set to multiply management workloads by 2029.

DigiCert's Certificate Management Outlook reports that 34% of companies experienced outages from expired certificates and 40% from mismanagement, with nearly one in four citing incidents costing over $250,000. The CA/Browser Forum's move to 47-day certificate lifespans by 2029 will require renewals eight times more often and 40 times as many domain validations. Over half of organizations manage more than 1,000 certificates, yet only 10% have automation in place, with budget constraints and legacy systems cited as key barriers.

Help Net Security · 2d agoIndustry

Communicating Under Pressure: Best Practices for Service Providers

CISA, FBI, and international partners issued guidance on crisis communications for service providers during IT and OT outages, emphasizing clarity, transparency, and backup channels.

CISA, the FBI, and international partners published guidance on planning and executing clear, timely, audience-appropriate communications during IT and OT service outages, whether caused by cyber threat actors, human error, or natural hazards. The guidance stresses clarity, accountability, and transparency, and warns that outages at one organization can cascade across interconnected systems. It recommends critical infrastructure owners assume telecommunications may be unreliable and integrate backup communication methods into crisis plans, and points to CISA's CI Fortify initiative for OT isolation and recovery resources.

CISA Advisories · 14d agoAdvisory

Rapidly scaling online storage to serve over 1 billion ChatGPT users

OpenAI's Habitat online storage platform now handles over 70 million requests per second and 500 PB of data for 1 billion users.

OpenAI details the evolution of Habitat, its online storage platform backing ChatGPT and other products, which began in mid-2024 as a Python client-side library over Azure Cosmos DB. Habitat now processes more than 70 million requests per second, serves over 500 petabytes of data across nearly 40 geographic regions, and supports over 1 billion users weekly. By mid-2025 the client library approach became brittle, so OpenAI moved Habitat into a standalone service to centralize deployments, observability, and multi-tenancy reliability. This is part one of a two-part series; a future post will cover read optimization and scaling the Azure Cosmos DB partnership.

OpenAI News · 5d agoAI tools & infra1

Powering AI is an architecture problem

Sponsored analysis argues AI data centers need medium-voltage, inline power architecture after Virginia grid faults knocked over 3GW of load offline.

A sponsored MIT Technology Review piece recounts a July 22, 2026 transmission fault in Ashburn, Virginia that shed more than 3 GW of data center load, and a 2024 incident where one failed surge arrester dropped about 60 facilities and 1,500 MW. It argues legacy UPS-based power stacks fail at AI scale because campuses can swing 70% of load in milliseconds and trip offline during grid disturbances. The proposed fix moves protection to medium voltage (13.8 kV and above) in inline enclosures near substations, improving density, permitting timelines, and backup power economics. A full-scale system tested at the DOE National Laboratory of the Rockies cleared ERCOT large-load ride-through requirements.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 6d agoAI industry1

Four major AI models suffer rare overlapping downtime

OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google AI services suffered rare overlapping outages on Thursday, with most incidents resolved within hours.

Anthropic reported a partial outage with elevated errors on Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 starting at 9:23 am ET, identifying the cause within about 15 minutes and resolving it by 12:16 pm, with a brief Claude Sonnet 5 error spike after noon. OpenAI reported elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex from 10:43 am, marking the issue resolved at 12:55 pm after a mitigation. xAI's Grok showed a user-facing error message as DownDetector reports surged from fewer than 10 to 1,365 by 9:45 am, and Google also experienced interruptions during the same window.

Ars Technica · AI · 13d agoAI industry

You don’t have to join the hack-back program to inherit its risk

A new US presidential memorandum creates a vetted private hack-back program, leaving participating vendors and their customers with untested legal liability and collateral risks.

The August 12 National Security Presidential Memorandum directs the National Coordination Center, run jointly by DOJ and DHS, to approve covert surveillance and disruptive Cyber Effects Operations by vetted private companies, with a forfeitable bond of at least $1 million required as a contract condition. The analysis argues the criminal shield rests on an untested reading of the CFAA exemption at 18 U.S.C. 1030(f), with no civil safe harbor, no state-law preemption and no foreign-law protection. Non-participating organizations can still inherit risk through shared infrastructure collateral damage, lack of customer disclosure, Lloyd's bulletin Y5381 state-backed attack exclusions, and threat-intelligence pipelines feeding offensive proposals.

CSO Online · 9h agoPolicy & legal

CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

CIA deputy director says cyber operations built the intelligence picture enabling US forces to capture Nicolás Maduro in Operation Absolute Resolve.

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis said at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference that cyber operations built the intelligence picture that let US special operations forces locate and apprehend Nicolás Maduro within four minutes of landing during Operation Absolute Resolve. He cited the elevation of the Center for Cyber Intelligence to a full mission center as key to aligning resources around the cyber mission. The agency also created a Directorate of Mission Systems and cut its technology acquisition cycle from two to three years to a six-month target, completing more than 400 purchases within that period. Ellis said AI brings unprecedented speed and scale to cyber operations and analysis.

CyberScoop · 7d agoPolicy & legal 2 sources

When AI quietly breaks things, who pays?

Reed Smith partner David Halbreich explains how AI companies can avoid D&O/E&O coverage gaps around mergers, governance warranties, and claims timing.

In an interview, insurance recovery partner David Halbreich of Reed Smith outlines insurance pitfalls for AI companies under claims-made D&O and E&O policies. He highlights 'straddle' claims after mergers that fall between tail coverage and go-forward policies, potentially leaving policyholders with no coverage. He also warns that governance artifacts submitted in insurance applications, such as bias testing records and model cards, can become warranties carriers use to deny claims, and discusses who should answer AI-use questions and how business interruption coverage applies to cloud and compute vendor outages.

Help Net Security · 13d agoAI industry

Week in review: Compromised Zimbra servers, previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw exploited

Help Net Security's weekly digest highlights 274 compromised Zimbra servers, Gitea and Citrix NetScaler KEV additions, a PaperCut zero-day, and a suspected Iran-linked power plant attack.

The roundup reports at least 274 internet-facing Zimbra instances compromised via CVE-2026-73570, critical Gitea CVE-2026-60004 added to CISA's KEV catalog after exploitation began, and previously patched Citrix NetScaler flaw CVE-2026-8452 exploited in the wild. It also covers PaperCut NG/MF zero-day attacks, a suspected Iran-linked shutdown of a UK power plant, an FBI seizure of domains tied to a China-linked group that hit NASA, DOJ and the Senate, a cyberattack disrupting Boston Scientific, and the Manchester Airports Group breach. Additional items include Chameleon SEO poisoning phishing, Android car head unit proxy botnet malware, ReliaQuest social engineering by ShinyHunters, fake OpenAI Codex macOS malware, and AI-related workforce and supply chain interviews.

Treasury’s Scott Bessent says no liability exemptions for AI labs

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged Congress to reject AI labs' requested liability exemptions, arguing creator liability is the best safety guarantee.

Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the government should not grant frontier labs liability waivers, responding to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's slowdown essay. He cited Treasury's AI safety work since the release of Anthropic's Mythos model, whose cybersecurity risks prompted an April meeting, and coordination with banks and labs after the July Hugging Face cyberattack. Bessent also highlighted the Gold Eagle clearinghouse run with CISA and called for more US-built open-source models to counter China.

CyberScoop · 4h agoAI policy

Turn it off and on again, but for critical infrastructure

KTH researchers trained a reinforcement-learning intrusion response agent on an emulated segmented OT network that autonomously resets hosts and processes to disrupt intruders.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology built a containerized replica of a segmented industrial network, attacked it across 14 days, and captured 40,000 30-second traffic intervals to train a defense agent under partial observability. The agent observes six packet-count numbers per interval, maintains 500 running state hypotheses, and can reset supervisory hosts, water tank processes, or entire subnets, with resets rebooting the target, renewing credentials, and changing its IP. The best agent approached a full-visibility baseline but depends on an assumed attacker behavior model; the testbed comprised three supervisory hosts, two PLCs, two tanks, weak credentials, and CVE-2017-7494 exposure. The team released its implementation and plans validation on a real industrial testbed with a partner.

Help Net Security · 2d agoResearchCVE-2017-74942· 1 read

Cyberattack causes a flight delay? Airlines won’t owe you a hotel or meal

A new DOT rule exempts airlines from providing meal vouchers or hotels for cyberattack-caused delays if carriers comply with applicable cybersecurity regulations.

A Department of Transportation rule published in September 2026 adds "cybersecurity attacks" to a list of 10 "not controllable" flight disruption causes, creating a new delay tracking category and relieving compliant airlines of customer service obligations like meal vouchers and hotels. The rule stems from the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 and applies only when carriers demonstrate compliance with applicable cybersecurity regulations. Consumer groups reacted cautiously: FlyersRights criticized the lack of public comment, while the National Consumers League saw both certainty benefits and risks from ambiguous wording. The article cites prior aviation incidents including Scattered Spider's airline attacks and the 2024 Collins Aerospace hack that disrupted European flights.

CyberScoop · 4d agoPolicy & legal

Cliff Stoll’s DEF CON Talk

Schneier on Security posts about Cliff Stoll's DEF CON talk; the visible text provides no substantive details about its content.

Schneier on Security published a brief post referencing Cliff Stoll's talk at DEF CON. The available text consists almost entirely of standard blog navigation, author biography, and archive listings, with no concrete details about the talk itself. As a general security-community item, it carries no direct risk impact for defenders.

Schneier on Securityupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 2 sources1

Microsoft Investigating Microsoft 365 Copilot Access Issues Under Incident CP1470554

Microsoft is investigating a Microsoft 365 Copilot access disruption tracked as incident CP1470554, with no root cause or recovery timeline published.

Microsoft is investigating reports that users cannot open Microsoft 365 Copilot or encounter errors when interacting with it, tracked under Service Health incident CP1470554 in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The company has not disclosed a root cause, affected regions, or estimated recovery time. It follows several distinct Copilot availability failures between late August and September 10, including an authentication-configuration outage and a Copilot Chat configuration fault. Microsoft says the issue is not a breach or cyberattack and directs tenant admins to the Service Health Dashboard.

Cyber Security Newsupdated · 6h agofirst · 5d agoAI industry 2 sources1

12 Best Ransomware Protection Solutions Compared (2026): Features & Pricing

GBHackers compares 12 ransomware protection solutions for 2026, recommending layered stacks of EDR prevention, managed detection, containment, and guaranteed recovery.

The editorial comparison argues no single product stops ransomware, recommending a layered strategy across prevention, early detection, blast-radius containment, and clean recovery. CrowdStrike and SentinelOne are named best-in-class EDR, Huntress and Sophos MDR for managed 24/7 coverage, ColorTokens for microsegmentation containment, and Rubrik and Acronis for guaranteed recovery. The guide notes ransomware is now professionalized with double extortion and encryption sprints measured in minutes.

GBHackersupdated · 8h agofirst · 5d agoIndustry 14 sources1