Claude, the popular AI chatbot from Anthropic, appeared to experience a potential outage on Wednesday. Thousands of users reported trouble accessing Claude, with user error reports spiking at approximately 10:30 a.m. ET, according to DownDetector.
(DownDetector and Mashable are both owned by the same company, Ziff Davis.)
By 1:00 p.m. ET, user error reports were slowing down, though DownDetector is still reporting ongoing problems with Claude AI.
The majority of users (38 percent) reported problems with Claude Chat, while 29 percent reported problems with Claude Code and 25 percent with the Claude App.
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DownDetector showed a spike in Claude user error reports on Wednesday.
Credit: Screenshot courtesy of DownDetector
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One Mashable editor was unable to access the free version of Claude on desktop, with an error message saying, “You’ve hit your limit for Claude messages. Please wait before trying again. For higher limits, explore our Pro plan.” This, despite not having sent any messages to Claude previously. An additional pop-up states, “Service is temporarily busy. You can try again shortly.”
Rather than a true Claude outage, access may simply be temporarily restricted for free users. Claude has seen massive growth so far in 2026. In March, amid a feud with the Pentagon and Trump administration, an Anthropic spokesperson told Mashable the company was signing up more than 1 million new users a day.
Mashable reached out to Anthropic for comment, and we’ll update this story if we receive a response.
This is a developing story…
