Anthropic's Claude suffers major outage as demand surges following Pentagon dispute

Reviewed byNidhi Govil

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Anthropic's Claude experienced widespread service disruptions on Monday morning, affecting thousands of users attempting to access the AI chat app. The outage impacted Claude.ai and Claude Code while the Claude API continued functioning. The disruption comes as the chatbot topped Apple's App Store charts following a public clash with the Pentagon over military use restrictions.

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Anthropic faces widespread outage across Claude services

Anthropic experienced significant service disruptions on Monday morning, with thousands of users reporting problems accessing Claude and related products. The outage began just before 7 a.m. Eastern Time, affecting both Claude.ai and Claude Code, though the company confirmed the Claude API remained operational for business users

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. According to Downdetector, reported problems with Claude spiked around 6:45 a.m., with nearly 2,000 reports before dropping to 275 by 9:30 a.m.

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The company's status page indicated "elevated errors" across some services and "degraded performance" on Claude Opus 4.6, its latest model released last month

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. Most users encountered errors when attempting to log in, with the Claude app displaying a "temporary service disruption" message for logged-out users

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. Anthropic's investigation commenced at 03:15 UTC on March 3rd, with multiple updates confirming the team was working to identify and implement fixes

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Unprecedented demand follows Pentagon controversy

The Anthropic AI outage occurred amid what the company described as "unprecedented demand for Claude over the last week"

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. This surge in users followed a high-profile dispute with the Department of Defense over safeguards preventing military use of Claude for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The AI chat app rose to the top of Apple's App Store charts over the weekend, overtaking archrival ChatGPT after spending considerable time below the top 20

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President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products on Friday, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would designate the company as a supply-chain risk to national security

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. Anthropic has stated it hasn't yet received any formal notices regarding this designation

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Impact on developers and business users

While consumer-facing products experienced the widespread outage, Anthropic confirmed that those running apps integrating Claude through the Claude API were not experiencing disruption

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. The company's statement emphasized that "the issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths" rather than core API functionality

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Developers took to social media to express concerns about the service disruptions, with some noting the challenge of reverting to pre-generative-AI coding habits without Claude Code assistance

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. The timing of this Claude AI outage raises questions about infrastructure capacity as AI services face rapid user growth driven by both technological advances and public attention from policy disputes. As Anthropic works to restore full service, the incident highlights the growing dependence on AI tools and the critical need for robust infrastructure to handle sudden demand spikes in an increasingly competitive market where ChatGPT and other alternatives vie for user attention.

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