Anthropic confirms Claude is down in major outage affecting multiple services

Claude is experiencing a major outage, with users reporting login problems and degraded performance across several Anthropic services.

The incident began on August 16, 2026, at around 21:58 UTC, and is affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.

According to Anthropic’s status page, the company first said it was investigating an issue preventing some users from authenticating to Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.

A few minutes later, Anthropic reported a broader service disruption involving degraded performance on Claude.ai and platform.claude.com.

Claude down error when opening Claude.ai

For users, the outage can result in problems signing in, Claude failing to load, requests not completing, or other errors when using the affected services.

Anthropic’s status page currently classifies Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork as experiencing a major outage. Claude Console and the Claude API are currently listed as operational.

Anthropic has not disclosed what is causing the outage, and both incidents remain under investigation at the time of writing.

Update 1: Anthropic said at 21:58 UTC on August 16 that it was investigating authentication issues affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.

Update 2: At 22:07 UTC, Anthropic reported degraded performance affecting Claude.ai and platform.claude.com. The company says it is continuing to investigate the disruption.