Anthropic’s Claude faces third outage in March; free users impacted

Anthropic’s artificial intelligence chatbot Claude experienced another service disruption on March 17, marking the third outage reported this month.

As of 3:24 PM, close to 250 users had flagged issues with the platform on outage-tracking website Downdetector, indicating a fresh wave of access and performance problems.

Most users, around 56%, said they are struggling to use Claude Chat, while 30% and 13% report issues with the website and app, respectively.

According to Claude’s official status page, the company has identified the issue and is in the process of rolling out a fix. “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” the update said.

Users attempting to access the platform were also shown a message indicating temporary service disruption. “We’re performing maintenance to keep things running smoothly — Claude will be back in a bit.”

At present, the disruption appears to be limited to free-tier users of Claude.ai, with no immediate indication that paid or enterprise users are affected.