Claude Suffers Two Major Outages in Two Days, Anthropic Cites ‘Unprecedented Demand’

According to 1M AI News, on March 3rd, Anthropic's AI assistant Claude experienced significant service disruptions for two consecutive days on March 2nd and 3rd. On March 2nd at 6:49 AM ET, Anthropic announced they were investigating an issue of "elevated error rates" affecting claude.ai, the mobile app, Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Console, and Claude Code. Downdetector data showed over 2000 user reports at the peak of the outage. Upon service restoration, Anthropic stated that the team was working to "cope with the massive demand for Claude in recent days."

On March 3rd at UTC 03:15, the official status page again reported increased error rates for claude.ai, cowork, platform, and Claude Code, with the investigation still ongoing as of UTC 04:43. During the two outages, the Claude API (api.anthropic.com) and Claude for Government remained unaffected, with the consumer-facing services experiencing the most significant impact.

Anthropic attributed the outage to "unprecedented demand," disclosing that since January this year, free user growth has exceeded 60%, and paid subscribers have more than doubled since last October.

Bloomberg reported that the surge in demand was driven by a user backlash following OpenAI's AI partnership contract with the US Department of Defense—ChatGPT's uninstallations in the US spiked by 295% day-over-day, one-star ratings surged by 775%, and Claude's US downloads grew by 37%-88% week-over-week, temporarily surpassing ChatGPT in total daily downloads at one point. Users can monitor the real-time status of each service component at status.claude.com.