Claude experiences widespread outage as thousands report login failures amid Pentagon controversy

Reviewed byNidhi Govil

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Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot suffered a major service disruption on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users who encountered login failures and elevated errors. The outage hit Claude.ai and Claude Code while the Claude API continued functioning normally. The timing proved particularly challenging as Claude had just reached number one on Apple's App Store following heightened attention from the company's dispute with the Pentagon over AI safety guardrails.

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Anthropic's Claude AI Faces Major Service Disruptions

Anthropic confirmed a widespread outage affecting its Claude chatbot on Monday morning, with thousands of users reporting problems accessing the service. The company began investigating elevated errors at 11:49 a.m. GMT (6:49 a.m. ET), according to updates posted on its status page

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. Monitoring website Downdetector recorded nearly 2,000 active complaints within a short window, with 42% of users citing issues with the web-based chat interface and another 34% reporting problems with the mobile app

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Users attempting to access Claude.ai encountered various error messages, including "Claude is currently experiencing a temporary service disruption"

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. The AI chatbot outage also affected Claude Code, the company's AI-powered coding assistant, and the Claude Console developer platform

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. Many users experienced complete login failures, while those already logged in saw Internal Server Errors.

Claude API Continues Operating During Outage

Despite the service disruptions affecting Claude.ai, Anthropic clarified that the Claude API remained fully operational. "We have identified that the Claude API is working as intended," the company wrote on its status page approximately 30 minutes after the initial report. "The issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths"

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. This distinction meant that developers using Claude through third-party integrations or custom software applications did not experience the same level of disruption as users accessing the web interface directly

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The technical cause appears rooted in authentication infrastructure rather than the AI models themselves, explaining why users attempting new sessions were blocked entirely while some already logged in encountered different error types

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. By 13:22 UTC, Anthropic confirmed it had identified the cause and was implementing a fix, though no specific timeline for full restoration was provided

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Outage Timing Coincides with App Store Milestone

The Claude outage came at a particularly significant moment for Anthropic, as the chatbot app had just reached the number one position on Apple's App Store over the weekend, overtaking rival ChatGPT after spending considerable time below the top 20

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. The surge in popularity followed intense public attention surrounding Anthropic's dispute with the Pentagon over safety guardrails for military use of its AI technology

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This wasn't the first recent disruption for Claude users. The service experienced elevated errors on Saturday, February 28, 2026, with issues affecting Claude Opus 4.6, its latest generation large language model

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. The pattern suggests a period of high infrastructure strain as Anthropic scales to accommodate its rapidly growing user base

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Pentagon Controversy Drives User Surge

The influx of users to Claude appears directly connected to the company's public standoff with the Department of Defense. U.S. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products after the company refused to remove safeguards preventing its AI models from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons

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. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic as a supply-chain risk to national security, meaning companies working with the U.S. military cannot also work with Anthropic

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The Defense Department wanted unrestricted access to Claude for military purposes, while Anthropic insisted on maintaining guardrails to prevent the technology from being used to surveil U.S. citizens or for autonomous lethal strikes without human oversight

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. Hours after Trump's order, OpenAI founder Sam Altman announced his company had struck a deal with the Pentagon to provide AI technology for military use in classified environments

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Anthropic's stance has garnered popular support, particularly among Silicon Valley workers, even as it threatens the company's relationship with government agencies

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. The company stated it hasn't yet received formal notices regarding the supply-chain designation

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. As Anthropic works to restore full service, the company faces the challenge of managing unprecedented user growth while navigating complex political and ethical questions about AI deployment in sensitive government applications.

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