Anthropic Claude.ai, Code and Cowork suffer global major outage on August 17 with over 15,000 user complaints
From around 5:58 Beijing time on August 17, Anthropic's Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork services suffered a major outage. The issue began Sunday evening US Eastern Time, with over 15,000 US user complaints, while Claude Console and API remained operational.
On August 17, Anthropic's Claude.ai, Claude Code and Claude Cowork services suffered a major technical outage, with errors including login failures, page loading failures and request completions failing. The outage began around 5:58 Beijing time and affected users globally.
According to monitoring platform Downdetector, the issue started at approximately 6pm US Eastern Time on Sunday. At peak, the US region received over 15,000 user complaints, while Germany and Canada saw roughly 1,500 users reporting issues. Anthropic's status page marked all three services as experiencing a major outage.
Notably, Claude Console and the Claude API remained operational during the incident, providing buffer for enterprise developers that rely on Anthropic's interface. Anthropic has not yet disclosed the specific cause of the outage or an estimated time to recovery. The incident renewed attention to AI service reliability: as more individuals and enterprises integrate these tools into daily workflows, a single outage can translate into material productivity loss.