Claude Outage: Thousands Briefly Report Issues With Anthropic’s AI Chatbot

Forbes Business

by Ty Roush, Forbes Staff

February 25, 2026

AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary

Thousands of users experienced issues with Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude during a brief partial outage on Wednesday afternoon. According to DownDetector.com, over 4,700 reports of problems were logged shortly after noon EST, with issues subsiding below 200 by 1:30 p.m. The majority of the reported issues—about 45%—were related to Claude Chat, while 25% involved difficulties accessing Claude Code and 19% pertained to the Claude app. Anthropic’s status page indicated that the Claude Desktop app was having trouble opening for some users before a fix was deployed shortly before noon. Despite this, elevated errors were still being reported with Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6. This outage comes just weeks after another incident in January and follows the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6, Anthropic’s latest model, which the company claims is more advanced for coding, design, and computer usage. The previous rollout had caused a selloff in global software stocks as concerns about AI competition and market saturation grew. Forbes confirmed that Claude’s chat feature was functioning by 1:45 p.m., but the incident highlights the challenges large language models face in maintaining reliability at scale. The timing of this outage is particularly notable given Anthropic’s recent funding developments. Following a $30 billion funding round earlier this month, the company’s estimated market value now stands at $380 billion, up from approximately $61.5 billion as of March 2025 after a $3.5 billion fundraise. While the immediate issue was resolved, the recurring outages and their impact on user trust could have broader implications for Anthropic’s business and its position in the AI market. For readers interested in business, this outage underscores the risks associated with scaling AI technologies and the potential for operational hiccups to affect investor sentiment and market dynamics. The incident also raises questions about the stability of AI platforms as they continue to evolve and compete in a rapidly changing industry landscape.

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Originally published on Forbes Business on 2/25/2026