The simultaneous outage among major LLM providers on Sept. 3 necessitates a closer look at model exposure and infrastructure diversification.  

LLM providers Anthropic, OpenAI, and Grok each experienced an outage on Sept. 3 and resolved them within a few hours. 

Read more on the outage here.  

To mitigate outage issues, Grasshopper Bank is piloting “local LLM fallbacks” on top of its multicloud approach so that “we’re not fully exposed, even when the cloud providers go down simultaneously,” Chief Technology Officer Peter Chapman told FinAi News.  

The outage shows that a multicloud and multi-LLM strategy “isn’t bulletproof,” he said.  

Avoiding overreliance  

Building a flexible, diverse infrastructure is crucial to maintaining control over data and operations when an LLM or cloud provider goes down, David Moscatelli, chief executive of on-premises AI provider Go.AI, formerly Go Abacus, told FinAi News. 

“AI has moved from productivity tool to critical infrastructure remarkably fast,” he said. “Uptime and control now matter as much as electricity itself.  

“Organizations need systems designed so that an outage doesn’t bring their business to a halt. This isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a business risk that needs to be addressed now.” 

Mary Ann Miller, vice president and fraud executive adviser at identity verification platform Prove, similarly told FinAi News that the Sept. 3 outages “are another reminder that AI platforms are quickly becoming critical infrastructure.” 

“As financial institutions, businesses and consumers increasingly rely on tools like ChatGPT and Claude, the availability and security of these environments can no longer be treated as secondary concerns,” she said. 

OpenAI, Anthropic and Grok attributed the outages to internal infrastructure issues, but what caused them to go down simultaneously remains unclear.  

Continuous investment in infrastructure 

Truist was not affected by the Sept. 3 outage, but it marked an eye-opening moment for the bank, Donta Wilson, chief consumer and small business banking officer, told FinAi News, adding that AI outages are similar to other tech outages and banks should be prepared for all contingencies. 

 The $541 billion bank uses a major LLM provider in its Truist Assist chatbot, but it declined to disclose which one. 

“What’s important for us is to make sure we have good availability, stability and [are] continuously investing in [infrastructure],” Wilson said. “We run a bank … so that’s important regardless of AI or not.” 

The bank continuously evaluates the best way to be available for clients around the clock, Wilson said, adding that the bank will evaluate options as time progresses. 

“We’ll take those learnings fresh from yesterday and embed it into [our planning to see if] there’s anything we need to do in addition to what we already have,” Wilson said. 

FinAi Lending Summit, set for Oct. 7-8 in Las Vegas, will include speakers from Fifth Third and Capital One as well as a fireside chat with Piermont Bank founder and Chief Executive Wendy Cai-Lee. To learn more about the 2026 event and register for early-bird pricing through today, visit here.