UPDATE: Mar. 2, 2026, 4:37 p.m. UTC Anthropic has informed Mashable that Claude is now fully operational: "Claude is up and running on claude.ai and through our applications. We appreciate our users’ patience as our team addresses the remarkable demand we’ve experienced for Claude recently."
On Monday, Claude, the AI chatbot from Anthropic, experienced an outage, with the company acknowledging “increased errors.”
Claude Operational Update
At 11:49 a.m. GMT (6:49 a.m. ET), Anthropic announced on its Claude status page that they were "currently looking into this matter." Subsequent updates indicated that the problems were "associated with Claude.ai and the login/logout processes, and that the team had "identified that certain API functions are malfunctioning."
Anthropic provided an explanation to Mashable in a statement:
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Recent Outage Details
Claude is presently not accessible on our consumer-oriented platforms like claude.ai and our applications. However, the Claude API that supports businesses is still operational. Our team is diligently working to restore complete service, and we will provide updates as they become available. We thank everyone for their understanding as we strive to get everything back online amidst an unprecedented surge in demand for Claude over the past week.
As reported by Downdetector, more than 2,000 individuals have indicated experiencing problems with Claude (Note: Downdetector is a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.)
According to Anthropic, the issues impacted the Claude chatbot, Claude Opus 4.6 (its most recent large language model or LLM), Claude Console (the developer platform for Claude), and Claude Code (the AI-driven coding assistant from the company). The previous instance of Claude experiencing "elevated errors" occurred on Saturday, February 28, 2026, when problems were identified and subsequently fixed in Claude Opus 4.6.
User Impact and Feedback
At the moment of this writing, Claude. Image credit: Screenshot from Mashable / Claude
The outage occurred shortly after Claude surpassed competitor OpenAI’s ChatGPT in Apple’s App Store, achieving the top spot as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. (ChatGPT ranks second, while Google’s Gemini is in fourth place) — and the number of free Claude users has surged by over 60 percent since January. This chart victory came notably after former President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. government would cease using Anthropic technology, including Claude, which led OpenAI to secure a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to supply its AI technology for use in “classified settings.” Indeed, there are apprehensions.
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Technical Issues Identified
UPDATE: March 2, 2026, 2:42 p.m. UTC Included Anthropic’s remarks and further information from the Claude status page.
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