Anthropic reports major outage affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork

Anthropic reported a major disruption to several Claude services on August 16, 2026, leaving some users unable to sign in or use the company’s AI tools normally.

The incident began at approximately 21:58 UTC, according to Anthropic’s status updates. The company initially said it was investigating authentication problems affecting Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork. At 22:07 UTC, Anthropic expanded the incident description to include degraded performance on Claude.ai and platform.claude.com.

Users may encounter login failures, pages that do not load, requests that remain incomplete or other errors while accessing the affected services. Anthropic’s status page classified Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork as experiencing a major outage at the time of reporting.

Claude Console and the Claude API were listed as operational, indicating that the disruption was not affecting every Anthropic product. However, the company had not identified or disclosed the underlying cause, and both the authentication issue and broader performance degradation remained under investigation.

Services affected

• Claude.ai: authentication and performance problems reported
• Claude Code: authentication issues reported
• Claude Cowork: authentication issues reported
• platform.claude.com: degraded performance reported
• Claude Console and Claude API: listed as operational

The outage’s scope and duration were not immediately clear. Anthropic had not provided an estimated recovery time or indicated whether the incident was related to a security event, infrastructure failure or another technical issue.

Users experiencing problems can monitor Anthropic’s status page for service updates. Until the company completes its investigation, availability may continue to vary across products and regions.