Anthropic’s Claude AI model experienced its second global outage within 24 hours on March 3, preventing users worldwide from accessing its tools and services. The company’s status page classified the disruption as an “elevated error,” affecting both the Claude chatbot and additional tools, including CoWork, which recently drew attention for its market impact on SaaS stocks and heightened concerns among IT firms such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services.
In an update, Anthropic stated that a fix had been implemented and that it was monitoring the results. According to Downdetector, more than 300 users reported issues accessing Claude. At the time of reporting, the status page indicated that the issue was still under investigation. The company has not disclosed the exact cause of the repeated outages, though a surge in usage has been suggested as a possible factor.
Claude’s usage reportedly spiked after Anthropic declined to grant the US military unrestricted access to its AI system. The decision led to the company being labelled a “supply chain risk,” resulting in a ban on federal agencies using Claude. Around the same time, OpenAI signed an agreement with the Pentagon. OpenAI chief Sam Altman described the move as rushed and potentially opportunistic, which reportedly contributed to a wave of users shifting from ChatGPT to Claude. As a result, Claude downloads surged, making it the top-ranked app on Apple App Store over the weekend, while calls to boycott ChatGPT gained traction online.
Although no official explanation has been provided for the outages, some speculation linked them to the broader geopolitical situation. Reports indicated that Iran had struck three Amazon Web Services data centres in the Middle East — two in the UAE and one in Bahrain — disrupting AWS services. Amazon is Anthropic’s primary cloud provider and training partner, though no confirmed link has been established between those incidents and the Claude outages.
The disruptions sparked widespread reactions on social media, with some users referencing Anthropic’s dispute with the Pentagon and others sharing humorous posts about having to code manually while Claude was unavailable.
