Claude is down: What we know about the Anthropic outage
UPDATE: Mar. 2, 2026, 4:37 p.m. UTC Anthropic has told Mashable in a statement that Claude should be running as usual now: "Claude is back up and running across claude.ai and our apps. We're grateful to our users while the team works to match the incredible demand we've seen for Claude in recent days."
Claude, Anthropic's AI chatbot, went down on Monday, with the company confirming "elevated errors."
At 11:49 a.m. GMT (6:49 a.m. ET), Anthropic posted on its Claude status page that it was "currently investigating this issue." Later updates said the issues were "related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths, and that the team had "discovered that some API methods are not working."
Anthropic explained to Mashable in a statement:
Claude is currently unavailable on our consumer-facing surfaces such as claude.ai and our apps. The Claude API that powers businesses remains unaffected. Our team is working to restore full service and we’ll share updates as we have them. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we work to bring things back online while experiencing unprecedented demand for Claude over the last week.
According to Downdetector, over 2,000 users reported issues with Claude (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
The errors, according to Anthropic, affected the Claude chatbot, Claude Opus 4.6 (its latest generation large language model or LLM), Claude Console (the Claude developer platform), and Claude Code (the company’s AI-powered coding assistant). The last time Claude saw "elevated errors" was on Saturday, Feb. 28, 2026, with issues found and resolved affecting Claude Opus 4.6.
The outage came hours after Claude dethroned competitor OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple's App Store, hitting number one as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. (ChatGPT is second, Google's Gemini is fourth) — and free Claude users have increased more than 60 percent since January. The chart win came notably after President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government would no longer use Anthropic tech including Claude, after which OpenAI entered into a deal with the U.S. Department of War to provide its AI technology for military use in "classified environments". Yes, there are concerns.
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UPDATE: Mar. 2, 2026, 2:42 p.m. UTC Added Anthropic's statement and additional updates from the Claude status page.
Topics Artificial Intelligence
Shannon Connellan is Mashable's UK Editor based in London, formerly Mashable's Australia Editor, but emotionally, she lives in the Creel House. A Tomatometer-approved critic, Shannon writes about entertainment, tech, social good, science, culture, and Australian horror.
