Anthropic’s Claude AI model reported its second global outage in 24 hours on March 3, locking out users from accessing its tools and services worldwide. Anthropic’s Claude status page confirmed the outage, classifying it as an “elevated error” which impacted both the Claude AI chatbot as well as more specialised and non-specialised tools like CoWork, which recently came in news and went viral for crashing SaaS stocks, sparking fear and concerns that put many IT companies like Infosys and TCS on notice.
Update: Anthropic’s Claude Status page states that the company has implemented a fix. The update states, “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks these outrages, more than 300 people reported that they could not use Claude. The outage hasn’t been fully resolved at the time of writing, with the Claude status page still showing, “We are currently investigating this issue.” Anthropic hasn’t revealed the exact reasons behind Claude going offline twice in 24 hours, though based on recent developments, it is safe to assume that a surge in usage could be one possible reason why Claude went down for users globally.
Claude saw a big uptick in usage after Anthropic found itself in the middle of a national controversy after it refused to give the US Military unrestricted access to Claude AI following which it was labelled as a “supply chain risk” banning all federal agencies from using Claude. But as all this was happening, OpenAI swooped in and signed an agreement with the Pentagon, a move its chief, Sam Altman, said was rushed and might seem opportunistic at least on the surface, leading to mass migration of ChatGPT users to Claude. Claude downloads as a result sky-rocketed, making it the number one app on Apple’s App Store over the weekend. Meanwhile, boycott/cancel ChatGPT voices grew stronger on social media.
Why Claude went offline?
While there is no official word on the reason behind the Claude outage(s), the ongoing Iran conflict may also have played a key role. Iran struck three Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the Middle East – two in UAE and one in Bahrain disrupting AWS services. Amazon is Anthropic’s primary cloud service provider and training partner. However, there is no official word on these two incidents being linked.
Social media reactions to Claude outage
Users on social media were quick to react to this outage, while making references to Anthropic’s fallout with the Pentagon. Research firm Citrini’s official account wrote, “Did the US government bomb Anthropic?”
Conspiracy theories did not stop there. Another user posted, “Last week: The president bans all federal use of Anthropic Claude. Today: Claude is down for an irregular amount of time.”
Though some users also joked that with the AI model down, they may have to start coding manually again. One person shared a video of an orangutan trying to cut wood, and wrote, “How it feels to code manually after Claude is down.”
