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Anthropic’s Claude chatbot experienced a widespread outage early Monday morning, leaving users unable to access the AI assistant just as its popularity is surging.
According to outage reports and Anthropic’s status updates, issues began around 5 a.m. ET, peaked shortly after 6 a.m., and were largely resolved later in the morning.
Claude’s outage comes at a moment when the chatbot is seeing a surge in new users. In recent days, a growing “QuitGPT” movement has encouraged people to cancel ChatGPT subscriptions following backlash over OpenAI’s agreement to deploy its models within U.S. defense networks.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, earned praise after reportedly rejecting similar military uses, prompting some users to switch platforms — and even pushing Claude to the top of app store rankings.
What happened
That sudden influx of traffic may help explain why the service struggled with users reporting errors loading Claude on web and mobile, as well as failures inside coding tools and integrations, and slow or unresponsive chats.
Anthropic said the disruption was caused by “unprecedented demand” and a surge in usage. But while users' access was impacted, reports indicate API and enterprise integrations were mostly unaffected.
That distinction suggests backend systems remained stable while consumer-facing services were strained.
Why demand is surging
The outage comes during a breakout moment for Claude. The platform has surged in downloads and usage in recent weeks as ChatGPT users explore new platforms, developers rapidly adopt it for coding workflows, and enterprises expand integrations.
It's clear the AI competition is intensifying across ChatGPT, Gemini and others as more people use AI tools daily. Today's disruption highlights a growing reality of the AI era, underscoring that users are increasingly weighing the companies behind the chatbots, not just what each AI can do.
How companies deploy AI and partner with institutions, restrictions and how information is stored and protected are also important to them.
Bottom line
AI usage is scaling faster than many platforms anticipated — and right now, a growing number of users are choosing Claude over ChatGPT. As adoption accelerates and more developers, professionals and everyday users migrate their workflows, even leading providers are facing demand pressures similar to the early days of cloud computing and streaming.
When millions rely on a single assistant at once, spikes in demand can strain even the most advanced systems.
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