Claude AI Recovering After Widespread Outage on Wednesday

Anthropic’s Claude is coming back from a major outage on Wednesday. The site experienced major errors for part of the day, but reports of problems on DownDetector, which tracks service outages on various websites, have dropped significantly. Earlier, more than 4,000 users reported issues accessing Claude. But as of 3 p.m. PT, that number had fallen to about 150, suggesting the outage was easing.

Claude’s status page shows a red-bordered message announcing “elevated errors across all models,” but also noting “we have seen recovery in success rates across all models and are monitoring closely to ensure no further issues.”

“We’re aware some users are experiencing errors across Claude.ai, Claude Code, and the Claude API,” an Anthropic representative told CNET in an email. “Our team is working to restore service, and we’re appreciative of everyone’s understanding while we work through this.”

CNET’s attempts to access Claude earlier on Wednesday returned the error message: “Due to unexpected capacity constraints, Claude is unable to respond to your message. Please try again soon.” But at 3:30 p.m. PT, Claude was working normally.

The Claude status page showed that the site also experienced errors on Monday involving Claude Opus 5 and Haiku 4.5, though those errors were resolved that day, with Tuesday showing no errors. Claude Opus 5 is a powerful flagship model of the AI, and Haiku 4.5 is a faster, more lightweight model.

CNET named Claude the best AI chatbot after reviewing all the major AI tools, praising its consistency and noting that it is often considered to be more work-focused than general-purpose. Developer Anthropic is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot ChatGPT.