Thousands of users experienced difficulties accessing the popular AI tool on Wednesday.
Updated on Wednesday, April 15 at 1:37 p.m. ET — An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed that Claude faced an outage on Wednesday afternoon, affecting the Claude.ai desktop browser as well as Anthropic’s Cowork and Claude Code services. “Claude.ai and Cowork are currently down for most users, and some may also have trouble logging into Claude Code. Our team is working to restore service and appreciates everyone’s understanding,” said the spokesperson.
Claude, the popular AI chatbot from Anthropic, seemingly encountered a potential outage on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting access issues. User error reports surged around 10:30 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector.
By 1:00 p.m. ET, user error reports were decreasing, though DownDetector continued reporting ongoing issues with Claude AI. The majority of users (38 percent) reported problems with Claude Chat, 29 percent with Claude Code, and 25 percent with the Claude App.
One Mashable editor couldn’t access the free version of Claude on desktop, receiving an error message about reaching Claude message limits despite not having sent any messages. Another pop-up indicated, “Service is temporarily busy. You can try again shortly.” This may suggest that free users’ access is temporarily restricted. Claude has seen significant growth in 2026, with Anthropic signing up over 1 million new users daily in March during a conflict with the Pentagon and Trump administration.
This is a developing story…