Anthropic’s Claude platform experienced a widespread service disruption on August 16, 2026, beginning at approximately 21:58 UTC. Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork were all affected, with users reporting inability to sign in, requests failing to complete, and pages failing to load. Anthropic’s status page classified all three services as experiencing a major outage; the Claude API and Claude Console remained operational throughout the incident.
The company acknowledged the issue in two updates: the first at 21:58 UTC flagged authentication failures across Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork, and a second at 22:07 UTC reported broader degraded performance across Claude.ai and platform.claude.com. Anthropic confirmed a full restoration at 22:40 UTC, bringing the total disruption to roughly 42 minutes. The company has not publicly disclosed the root cause.