Claude AI Faces Massive Outage as Demand Soars

The chat system called Claude, made by the company Anthropic, stopped working for many people early Monday. The team behind it said they were dealing with an “unprecedented demand” that had built up over the past week. At the height of the problem, almost 2, 000 users reported that Claude’s service was down. The outage began around 6:40 a. m. in New York, according to the monitoring site Downdetector. Anthropic’s message on WhatsApp explained that its public‑facing sites, like claude. ai and the company’s apps, were offline. However, companies that had already integrated Claude’s models into their own systems did not notice any trouble. The company thanked people for their patience and promised to bring everything back online quickly. By 10:50 a. m. , the status page indicated that all systems were working again. Claude’s popularity has exploded recently, especially after the U. S. Defense Department named Anthropic a “supply‑chain risk. ” That designation is rare for an American firm and could hurt its business.Since January, the number of free users has jumped more than 60 %. Paid subscribers have doubled since October. Anthropic insists its technology must not be used for spying on Americans or creating fully autonomous weapons, and it has said that any pressure from the Department of Defense will not change its stance. The company plans to fight the supply‑chain risk label in court. Its CEO, Dario Amodei, called the move “retaliatory and punitive. ” Shortly after Anthropic was flagged, a larger competitor, OpenAI, agreed to place its own AI models inside the Defense Department’s classified network. The deal was framed around OpenAI’s principles that forbid domestic mass surveillance and require human oversight for any forceful applications. Some users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT already called for cancellations after the agreement, arguing that it could enable harmful uses. Meanwhile, Claude’s app has stayed at the top of Apple’s App Store for several days, and many Silicon Valley employees have shown support for the company’s position.