The Claude chatbot by Anthropic suffered a large-scale outage on June 18: thousands of users around the world found that the service was not responding and not loading messages. According to the DownDetector service, the number of complaints began to rise sharply around 10:03 Moscow time.

The problems coincided with a tense news backdrop around the company. This week Anthropic found itself at the center of several events at once — from a major bank blocking access to its models to negotiations with the U.S. and EU authorities.

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The scale of the outage

According to status aggregators, over the day users filed from 420 to more than 770 complaints about Claude's operation. Most often people reported that messages were not being sent or loaded in the browser, and the service was not responding.

The third-party monitoring service StatusGator recorded signs of an outage around 10:00 Moscow time, noting that the problem remained without official confirmation for some time. Some users of the free plan received a message that Claude could not respond due to a lack of capacity.

This is not the first disruption in the service's operation over the month. Earlier, at the beginning of June, Claude experienced a major outage that affected the web interface, the mobile app, and the Claude Code platform, so the current incident continues a series of technical problems.

The tense backdrop around Anthropic

The outage came at a moment when Anthropic is under close scrutiny. As the Financial Times reported, citing sources, the bank JPMorgan Chase barred its employees in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic's models. The wording in the license agreement prompted the bank to remove the Claude models from its internal list of approved language models.

JPMorgan repeated the move of Goldman Sachs, which back in April excluded Claude from the list of approved tools for its bankers in Hong Kong. Both decisions fit into the growing tension between the U.S. and China around AI technologies, data security, and access to advanced computing tools.

Source: BeInCrypto