UPDATE: March 2, 2026, 4:37 p.m. UTC Anthropic has informed Mashable that Claude is now functioning normally: "Claude is operational again on claude.ai and in our applications. We appreciate our users’ patience as the team strives to meet the remarkable demand we’ve experienced for Claude recently."
On Monday, Claude, the AI chatbot from Anthropic, experienced downtime, 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 it was "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 a statement to Mashable regarding the situation:
Mashable Light Speed Interested in more extraordinary technology, space, and science stories? Subscribe to Mashable’s weekly Light Speed newsletter. Loading… Join Now Use this option Instead By clicking Join Now, you confirm you are 16+ and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Thank you for subscribing!
Recent Downtime Issues
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 problems with Claude (Note: Downdetector is a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, which also owns Mashable.)
According to Anthropic, the issues impacted the Claude chatbot, specifically Claude Opus 4.6 (its most recent large language model), Claude Console (the developer platform for Claude), and Claude Code (the AI-driven coding assistant from the company). The previous instance of Claude experiencing “increased errors” occurred on Saturday, February 28, 2026, when problems were identified and subsequently fixed concerning Claude Opus 4.6.
User Impact and Response
At the moment of this writing, Claude is experiencing issues. Source: Screenshot from Mashable / Claude
The outage occurred shortly after Claude surpassed 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, leading OpenAI to secure a contract with the U.S. Department of War to supply its AI technology for use in “classified environments.” Indeed, there are apprehensions.
Interested in more technology updates? Subscribe to Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter.
Technical Problems Identified
UPDATE: March 2, 2026, 2:42 p.m. UTC Included Anthropic’s response and further details from the Claude status page.
Your Featured Video Explores: Is TikTok in the U.S. Restricting Its Users?
