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Anthropic's Claude hit by worldwide outage affecting millions of users

Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude experienced a 55-minute worldwide partial outage on March 2, 2026, affecting claude.ai, the desktop app, and Claude Code while the developer API remained operational.

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Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude went down for approximately 55 minutes on Monday morning in a worldwide partial outage that knocked out the consumer web interface, desktop app, and Claude Code while leaving the developer API untouched. Thousands of users reported being unable to access Claude's chat interface, encountering HTTP 500 errors, frozen prompts, and a "Claude will return soon" splash page, according to Downdetector data showing roughly 2,000 individual reports at peak.

The outage highlights the growing reliance on AI chatbots as everyday productivity tools. Claude, which competes directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has become a go-to assistant for coding, writing, and research tasks. When consumer-facing AI services go down -- even briefly -- the disruption now ripples across millions of workflows in ways that were unthinkable just two years ago.

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