Major Claude Outage: Anthropic's Technical Issues Amid Geopolitical Pressure and Bank Blockades
Anthropic's Claude chatbot experienced a major outage on June 18. Thousands of users worldwide encountered issues with the service failing to respond and load messages. According to the DownDetector aggregator, the peak of complaints occurred at 10:03 AM Moscow time.
Access problems with Claude arose during an extremely tense period for the company. This week, Anthropic found itself at the center of several events simultaneously — from a major bank blocking access to its models to negotiations with US and EU authorities.
Scale and Timeline of the Outage
Over the course of the day, users submitted between 420 and over 770 complaints about Claude's operation. Most commonly, people reported that messages were not sending or loading in the browser, and the service was unresponsive. The monitoring service StatusGator detected signs of the outage around 10:00 AM Moscow time, noting that the problem remained without official confirmation for some time. Some users on the free tier received a message stating that Claude could not respond due to insufficient capacity.
This is not the first service disruption this month. Earlier, in early June, Claude experienced a major outage affecting the web interface, mobile app, and the Claude Code platform, so the current incident continues a series of technical problems.
Tense Background Surrounding Anthropic
The outage occurred at a time when Anthropic is under intense scrutiny. JPMorgan Chase bank banned its employees in Hong Kong from accessing Anthropic's models. Wording in the licensing agreement prompted the bank to remove Claude models from its internal list of approved language models.
JPMorgan followed the step taken by Goldman Sachs, which had already excluded Claude from the list of approved tools for its bankers in Hong Kong back in April. Both decisions fit into the growing tension between the US and China over AI technologies, data security, and access to advanced computing tools.
The backdrop is further complicated by a US export directive. Earlier this week, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, ordered a halt to the export of the Mythos and Fable models to all foreign nationals, citing the risk of their use by the military intelligence of China, Russia, and other countries.
Restrained EU Reaction and G7 Dinner
Despite Washington's tough move, Europe is not inclined towards confrontation. Diplomats and officials from G7 countries emphasize their readiness to work with the US to mitigate AI risks and want to turn the incident into a platform for cooperation, rather than a cause for division. According to one European diplomat, the EU had hoped to achieve unity on advanced models before the end of the summit, with the main task being to restore trust.
The first opportunity to state a position was the G7 leaders' dinner with heads of leading AI companies on June 17 in Évian-les-Bains, France. The meeting was attended by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI head Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and French Mistral founder Arthur Mensch, as well as US President Donald Trump. The official agenda focused on how AI can stimulate economic growth and make societies more resilient — not on cybersecurity threats.
Nevertheless, the dispute between the Trump administration and Anthropic remained the "elephant in the room," according to one industry representative. Significantly, a report on the bilateral meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Trump on the sidelines of the summit did not mention the Anthropic issue at all.
Brussels is acting cautiously also because no official notification of export controls has been received from US authorities — only Anthropic's own statement exists. EU technology chief Henna Virkkunen emphasized that any response measures in this situation should not be discriminatory towards partners.
My analysis: Claude's technical outages are叠加 on top of serious geopolitical pressure and a loss of trust from key financial institutions. This is a critical moment for Anthropic: the company needs not only to stabilize its infrastructure but also to build a new strategy for interacting with regulators and corporate clients to avoid losing its position in the AI race. The market will be watching closely to see how Anthropic handles this dual challenge.