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Anthropic’s Claude, one of the world’s most popular AI assistants, has been plagued by a series of high-profile availability issues this week.
The problems reached a critical point on Wednesday, April 8, following a string of “intermittent” outages that have turned the once-reliable chatbot into a source of intense frustration for professionals and casual users alike.
The disruption began in earnest on Monday, April 6, when a massive spike in user reports on DownDetector – peaking at over 3,000 – signalled that the service was buckling under pressure.
Users attempting to log in or send messages were met with 500 or 529 errors, while those who could get through found the AI “stuck in a thinking loop,” perpetually processing queries without ever delivering an answer. Anthropic confirmed that the service was experiencing “elevated errors” across its web interface, mobile app and even its dedicated voice mode.
The root cause appears to be what analysts call a “success tax.” As Claude has climbed to the top of the App Store rankings, the sudden surge in traffic has overwhelmed Anthropic’s authentication layers and front-end systems.
Unlike a failure of the AI model itself, these outages are often caused by “cascading failures” in the supporting infrastructure. When the primary system fails to handle the load, it can trigger a “death spiral” where repeated login attempts from frustrated users further congest the network.
While Anthropic claimed to have “applied a fix” late on Monday, the stability proved short-lived. Like clockwork, the errors returned on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. Specifically, the company noted that the “Sonnet 4.6” model, which powers much of the free and professional offering, was seeing the highest rate of timeouts.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the situation remains fluid. Although Anthropic’s status page has transitioned into “monitoring” mode several times after applying patches, the recurring nature of the “Major Outage” suggests the underlying capacity issues have not been fully resolved.
For many enterprise users, the “rolling instability” has served as a wake-up call regarding single-vendor dependency. Until Anthropic can permanently bolster its servers to meet its growing popularity, many users are being forced to pivot to alternative models including GPT-4o or Gemini 1.5 Pro to keep their workflows moving.
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