Anthropic’s Claude suffered a widespread service disruption on Sunday, leaving users unable to log in or send messages across several products. The company later restored the affected services and said it was monitoring the recovery, while outage reports peaked at more than 15,000.
Anthropic’s Claude went offline for users across multiple services on Sunday, with authentication failures preventing people from accessing the AI chatbot, Claude Code and other tools. The disruption lasted roughly 30 to 40 minutes before the company restored its services.
The incident affected claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code and Claude Cowork, according to Anthropic’s status page. The company initially flagged an authentication problem before expanding its investigation to reports of degraded performance across its wider service.
Outage-monitoring website Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints at around 6pm EDT on August 16. The number of reports climbed rapidly, passing 15,000 by about 6.15 PM, suggesting the disruption was affecting a substantial number of users.
Several users said they were met with an “authentication service unavailable” message when attempting to sign into Claude. Others reported that they could access the service but were unable to send messages or use Claude normally.
The outage also prompted a stream of complaints from users on social media. One user said they had been seeing an authentication error for around 15 minutes, while another joked that “we are in the stone age now” after finding that Claude was unavailable.
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Anthropic did not immediately provide a detailed explanation for what triggered the disruption. Its status updates instead focused on the recovery process. At one point, the company said it had deployed a fix and was monitoring the response.
The company subsequently marked the incident as resolved, confirming that the services affected by the outage had recovered. The status page indicated that the disruption had been relatively brief, although users experienced different symptoms depending on the Claude product they were trying to access.
The timing of the incident meant the outage occurred on Sunday in the US, with some users noting that the disruption could have been more disruptive had it happened during the working week. Claude is used not only as a consumer chatbot but also through developer-facing services and coding tools, making availability important across several types of users.
For now, Anthropic has confirmed the restoration of its services but has not publicly disclosed a specific root cause for the incident. Users who encountered authentication or access problems should therefore be able to use Claude normally again, based on the company’s latest status update.