Claude was down. Here's what Anthropic told us.

UPDATE: Mar. 2, 2026, 4:35 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, experienced technical issues, the company confirmed on Monday.

At 6:49 a.m. ET on Monday, Anthropic posted on its Claude status page that it was investigating "elevated errors" occurring with the Claude chatbot, Claude Opus 4.6 (its latest generation large language model), Claude Console (the Claude developer platform), and Claude Code (the company’s AI-powered coding assistant).

According to Downdetector, over 2,000 users reported issues with Claude (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)

So, what does Anthropic say the issue was?

Anthropic explained to Mashable in a statement that its team was working on a fix, saying:

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.

"We have discovered that some API methods are not working and we are investigating," the company further wrote on the Claude status page, about everything but Claude Opus 4.6. For that LLM itself, Anthropic only said, "The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented."

This level of "unprecedented demand" Anthropic mentioned to Mashable is right. The outage comes after Claude took the number one spot from OpenAI's ChatGPT in Apple's App Store, now the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. (ChatGPT is second, Google's Gemini is fourth).

This also comes after Donald Trump announced that the U.S. government would stop using Anthropic tech including Claude. Following this, OpenAI entered into a deal with the U.S. Department of War for military use of its AI tech in "classified environments".

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