Massive Claude outage: Anthropic under fire from regulators and banks
On June 18, Anthropic's Claude chatbot experienced a global outage. Thousands of users worldwide faced the service ceasing to respond and failing to load messages. According to data from the aggregator DownDetector, the number of complaints spiked sharply around 10:03 AM Moscow time.
The problems coincided with an extremely tense news environment surrounding the company itself. This week, Anthropic found itself at the center of several events: from a major bank blocking access to its models to negotiations with US and EU authorities.
Scale of the Outage: Not the First Incident This Month
Over the course of a day, users filed between 420 and over 770 complaints about Claude's operation. Most commonly, reports indicated that messages were not sending or loading in the browser, and the service was unresponsive. The third-party monitoring service StatusGator detected signs of the outage around 10:00 AM Moscow time, noting that the issue 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.
Notably, this is not the first service disruption this month. In early June, Claude already experienced a major outage affecting the web interface, mobile app, and the Claude Code platform. The current incident continues a string of technical problems, which is a worrying signal for investors and corporate clients.
Geopolitics and Business: Pressure Mounts
The outage comes at a time when Anthropic is under intense scrutiny. According to the Financial Times, citing sources, JPMorgan Chase 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 of 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 tensions between the US and China over AI technologies, data security, and access to advanced computing tools.
The backdrop is further complicated by the US export directive. Earlier this week, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, in a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, ordered the suspension of exports 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. Against this backdrop, a G7 leaders' dinner took place on June 17 with Amodei's participation, and a meeting between the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA and Anthropic was scheduled for June 18 in San Francisco. US President Donald Trump stated on Wednesday that negotiations with the company were proceeding normally.
Despite Washington's tough stance, Europe is not inclined towards confrontation. Diplomats and officials from G7 countries emphasize their readiness to work with the US to reduce 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 summit's end, with the main task being to restore trust.
My analysis: The current outage is not just a technical inconvenience. It is an indicator that Anthropic's infrastructure is failing to handle the load at a time when the company is under unprecedented geopolitical and regulatory pressure. The combination of technical problems with a loss of trust from key financial institutions like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs creates an extremely negative backdrop for Claude's further development. If Anthropic does not resolve the scaling issue and restore its reputation, we could witness a serious reshuffling of the AI assistant market.