Ethan Carter
Updated on Wednesday, April 15 at 1:37 p.m. ET — A spokesperson for Anthropic confirmed to Mashable that the AI chatbot Claude was experiencing significant service outages on Wednesday afternoon. This disruption impacted the Claude.ai desktop browser, along with the widely used Anthropic services such as Cowork and Claude Code.
“Currently, Claude.ai and Cowork are experiencing downtime for most users, and some individuals are facing difficulties logging into Claude Code. Our dedicated team is actively working to restore services, and we appreciate the understanding of our users as we resolve these issues,” stated the spokesperson.
For details on the initial outage, please refer to our original report below. We will keep this page updated with fresh information as it becomes available and as services are restored.
On Wednesday, Claude, the renowned AI chatbot developed by Anthropic, appeared to face a potential outage. Reports indicated that thousands of users encountered access issues, with user error notifications surging around 10:30 a.m. ET, as highlighted by DownDetector.
(It is worth noting that both DownDetector and Mashable are subsidiaries of the same parent company, Ziff Davis.)
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By 1:00 p.m. ET, the frequency of user error reports started to diminish, although DownDetector continues to show ongoing issues with Claude AI. A significant portion of users, specifically 38 percent, reported difficulties with Claude Chat, while 29 percent faced challenges with Claude Code and 25 percent encountered problems with the Claude App.
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The DownDetector platform indicated a surge in user error reports related to Claude on Wednesday.
Credit: Screenshot courtesy of DownDetector
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A Mashable editor encountered issues accessing the free version of Claude on desktop, receiving an error message that stated, “You’ve hit your limit for Claude messages. Please wait before trying again. For higher limits, explore our Pro plan.” This occurred even though the editor had not previously sent any messages to Claude. An additional notification appeared, indicating, “Service is temporarily busy. You can try again shortly.”
It seems that rather than a complete outage of Claude, access might simply be temporarily restricted for users on the free tier. Claude has been experiencing unprecedented growth throughout 2026. In March, during a contentious period with the Pentagon and the Trump administration, a spokesperson from Anthropic informed Mashable that the company was acquiring over 1 million new users daily.
This story is still developing…
Daniel Mercer
