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

On March 17, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, Claude, encountered yet another service interruption, marking the third outage for the month. Reports on the outage-tracking platform Downdetector indicated that nearly 120 users were experiencing issues by 2:20 PM, highlighting ongoing access and performance challenges. The official status page for Claude confirmed that the company has pinpointed the source of the problem and is actively working on a solution. "The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented," the update noted. Users trying to access the platform were met with a notification about the temporary service disruption, stating, "We’re performing maintenance to keep things running smoothly — Claude will be back in a bit." Currently, the outage seems to primarily affect free-tier users of Claude.ai, with no immediate reports of disruptions impacting paid or enterprise customers.