Anthropic confirms Claude is down in major outage affecting multiple services

Anthropic's Claude AI services are experiencing a significant outage, with users reporting difficulties logging in and degraded performance across multiple platforms. The disruption began on August 16, 2026, around 21:58 UTC.

The affected services include Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, all of which are currently classified as experiencing a "major outage" on Anthropic's official status page. Initially, Anthropic confirmed it was investigating an issue preventing some users from authenticating to these services.

Minutes later, at 22:07 UTC, the company reported a broader service disruption, noting degraded performance on Claude.ai and platform.claude.com. Users have encountered problems signing in, services failing to load, and requests not completing.

As of the latest updates, the Claude Console and the Claude API are listed as operational and do not appear to be impacted by the ongoing incident. Anthropic has not yet disclosed the root cause of the outage, stating that both incidents remain under investigation.