Anthropic Claude and Microsoft services face major outages

Claude login issues emerge

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot, reported a significant disruption early Friday morning. Users found themselves unable to log in to the main Claude.ai application or the company's coding tool, Claude Code. The company officially acknowledged the problem on its status page at 4:58 a.m. Eastern time.

The status page currently lists a major outage for the primary chatbot interface. It also notes a partial outage affecting the developer console at platform.claude.com. While the company is actively investigating the login failures, they have not yet provided a specific cause or an estimated time for a resolution.

This disruption comes at a time when many developers and writers rely on Claude for high-volume tasks. Because the issue specifically impacts the login process, users are currently locked out of the environment entirely rather than just experiencing slow performance. The company remains in the process of identifying the root source of the technical glitch.

The Microsoft 365 connection

While Anthropic is investigating its own login problems, a separate issue is linked directly to Microsoft services. Anthropic confirmed that the tools allowing Claude to interact with Outlook mail, calendars, and files have been failing for most requests. This specific functionality is currently listed as affected on the Anthropic status page.

Anthropic stated that this specific problem is caused by a Microsoft 365 service incident. This is not the first time a major provider has seen its connectors break; OpenAI reported similar issues on Thursday. Their Microsoft connectors for ChatGPT were also broken, preventing their tools from working as expected during the same window.

This highlights the dependency of modern AI tools on third-party cloud infrastructure. Even if an AI model is running perfectly on its own servers, it cannot perform automated tasks if the connection to the user's email or calendar is severed. For many businesses, this means the 'smart' features of AI are currently offline due to external infrastructure failures.

A global scale of disruption

The underlying Microsoft issue began on Thursday afternoon and has persisted into a second day of service degradation. The problem initially centered on reaching Exchange Online mailboxes across the Americas. Microsoft's status account warned that users were experiencing difficulties accessing their mail through multiple different connection methods.

The scale of the outage has reached far beyond individual home users. Government offices in several countries, including Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan, reported being hit by the disruption. Additionally, the outage impacted India's IndiGo airline and portions of the National Health Service in Britain, showing how critical these services are to public infrastructure.

At the peak of the incident on Thursday, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 individual reports of Outlook problems. This volume of reports suggests a massive, systemic failure in the way Microsoft handles mail and calendar data. The outage has caused significant logistical hurdles for schools, town halls, and large corporations that rely on these platforms for daily communication.

Investigation and comparisons

Microsoft has been working to deploy fixes since the initial reports surfaced on Thursday. However, the company noted that a fix they rolled out did not perform as expected. Despite the widespread nature of the outage, Microsoft has stated there is no sign of a cyberattack involving the service disruption.

Officials in Australia have drawn comparisons between this current event and the 2024 CrowdStrike failure. That previous incident famously grounded flights and caused computers to freeze on a global scale. While the current situation involves mail and collaboration tools rather than a total system freeze, the comparison underscores the severity of the current infrastructure instability.

For users in regions like South Jersey, the outage means that offices and schools running on Outlook or Teams may still be experiencing delays on Friday. The best way for users to monitor the situation is to check the official Microsoft 365 status page. This allows users to see if the issue is a known incident before they spend time contacting their internal IT departments.