Claude Goes Down as Users Flood Apps to Protest OpenAI’s Pentagon Deal (Update)
+++ Late Monday afternoon MET, after several hours of downtime, Anthropic announced that the problem had been resolved. +++
“That’s not working right now. You can try again later.” That is currently the feedback from Claude chatbot by Anthropic when users around the world try to ask it a question or assign it a task. Because as the status page of the AI service currently shows, there are outages affecting Claude.ai (and thus also the Claude apps), the console for developers, as well as the popular coding tool Claude Code. Also Claude Opus 4.6, currently the strongest I model in the market, is affected.
The reasons can only be speculated about at the moment, and Anthropic has only confirmed that outages are occurring and that it has happened multiple times in recent days. The API services from Anthropic are not affected; it has been confirmed that these continue to function. So if apps or web services have API integration with the AI models of OpenAI’s rival, then these should continue to work as usual.
Claude ranks #1 in app charts
The outages could be related to the fact that interest in Claude from Anthropic is currently growing strongly. The Claude apps have climbed to the #1 position in the download charts in major markets such as the USA and Germany, overtaking the previously top-ranked ChatGPT. The high demand stems from the fact that OpenAI has made a deal with the US Department of Defense, which Anthropic refused. Meanwhile, Anthropic has communicated that it has discussed the cause of the problem and is working on a solution.
Since the weekend, there has been an increasingly visible movement away from ChatGPT toward Claude in order to protest against OpenAI’s Pentagon deal. Instructions like this one are also in high demand, explaining how to switch from ChatGPT, delete your account there, and transfer existing data to Claude.
