Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude experienced a widespread outage on Friday, June 5, 2026, affecting users in the United Kingdom, the United States, and other regions. Reports of problems began rising around 2:10 a.m. ET / 7:10 a.m. GMT, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, with complaints climbing quickly as users said Claude Chat was the main service affected. Claude’s status page initially confirmed a partial outage and said a fix was being implemented, but the issue persisted for several hours.
At the height of the disruption, Downdetector showed hundreds of reports in the UK and more than 100 in the US. While some Anthropic services, including Claude for Government and Claude Cowork, appeared less affected, the core chatbot experience was unreliable for many users. People reported that Claude would hang indefinitely, display “gathering my thoughts” messages, or respond with “still working on it” warnings. In some cases, the assistant failed to answer at all.
Anthropic later said the problem involved elevated errors on Opus 4.6, the company’s flagship model, though users also reported issues with Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Code. That suggested the disruption was broader than a single model or product. The company continued to update its status page throughout the morning, saying it was working to resolve the issue and later that a fix had been implemented and was being monitored.
During the outage, free-plan users also saw messages saying Claude was unable to respond due to “unexpected capacity constraints,” with prompts encouraging them to upgrade to Pro. The messaging drew criticism because it appeared while the service was still experiencing an outage. For many users, the incident highlighted the risks of depending heavily on a single AI platform for work and daily tasks.
Claude’s status gradually improved as the morning went on. Downdetector reports began falling sharply, first in the UK and then in the US, and users started seeing partial recovery on the web version. Some responses still showed slight delays, but the service was becoming more usable. Eventually, Anthropic updated its status page to “all systems operational,” indicating that the outage had been resolved.
The incident comes at a time when Claude has gained popularity among many users seeking alternatives to other major AI chatbots. Thursday’s disruption served as a reminder that even leading AI services can suffer significant downtime, with performance issues affecting chat, coding tools, and web access across multiple platforms. While the outage was temporary, it disrupted a large number of users and raised fresh concerns about reliability in fast-growing AI services.
