Claude's downtime reveals a deeper issue

THE STATUS PAGE for Anthropic's Claude has been unusually busy this month. On March 2, the chatbot suffered a global outage just days after climbing to the top of the App Store — a textbook case of what engineers grimly call "success tax." What began as elevated error rates escalated into a prolonged outage affecting web access, authentication, and model endpoints for several hours. Users were left unable to access the chatbot through its web interface, mobile apps, and coding tools, though the core API remained functional for developers with direct integrations. Then it happened again. And again. Across March, Claude logged at least ten distinct service disruptions, ranging from brief authentication hiccups to a brutal seven-hour stretch of elevated errors on Opus 4.6 on March 25 that sent more than 4,000 Downdetector reports flooding in.

Anthropic is not uniquely afflicted. OpenAI's ChatGPT suffered back-to-back outages on February 3 and 4, with over 28,000 Downdetector reports on the first day and more than 24,000 on the second. In the last 90 days alone, ChatGPT has logged 53 incidents — one major outage and 52 minor ones. The pattern is industry-wide: as AI models graduate from novelty to infrastructure, the gap between what users expect (always-on, instant, flawless) and what providers can deliver (complicated distributed systems running the most compute-intensive software ever written) is widening uncomfortably.