Claude Down as Anthropic Announces Vercept Acquisition Amid Live Outage

Claude is down for many users today, even as Anthropic publishes product announcements and promotes new features across social media.

Reports of a Claude down event began surfacing shortly after users encountered a full-screen “Claude will return soon” disruption page on claude.ai. Others report the site partially loading before displaying the message, “This isn’t working right now. You can try again later.”

According to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe, issues with Anthropic Claude began approximately 22 minutes before detection, and the last recorded outage earlier today lasted around 38 minutes. The outage tracker currently flags Claude as experiencing problems.

Anthropic Publishes Major Announcement During Outage

At the same time users are unable to access Claude reliably, Anthropic published a blog post announcing its acquisition of Vercept. Vercept is a small AI company built around a specific goal: making models that can reliably “see” what is happening on a screen and then interact with software the way a human would, using normal interfaces instead of custom APIs.

In plain English, Vercept’s work fits into the same bucket as “computer use” features, where an AI can operate inside live applications and handle multi-step tasks across real windows and tabs. That means clicking through websites, filling out forms, moving through desktop apps, and working inside tools like spreadsheets or dashboards without needing a dedicated integration for each one.

Anthropic positioned the acquisition as a way to accelerate the hardest parts of that problem, specifically perception and interaction. The company says Vercept’s team has spent years focused on how AI systems can understand what is on-screen and take the correct actions inside the same software people use every day. Anthropic also said Vercept will wind down its external product in the coming weeks and the team will join Anthropic directly.

The announcement also ties the acquisition to Claude’s recent progress on “computer use” benchmarks. Anthropic cited OSWorld, a widely used evaluation for computer use agents, saying its Sonnet models improved from under 15 percent in late 2024 to 72.5 percent “today,” alongside the launch of Claude Sonnet 4.6. Anthropic described that level as approaching human performance for tasks like navigating complex spreadsheets and completing web forms across multiple browser tabs.

Notably, the post does not address the claude down reports or current service instability that many users are experiencing while the announcement is being promoted.

New Features Promoted on X

On X, the official Claude account promoted new “Cowork” features including scheduled recurring tasks, plugin support, and a new Customize tab in the sidebar. The feature is currently in research preview on macOS and Windows for paid plans.

New in Cowork: scheduled tasks.

Claude can now complete recurring tasks at specific times automatically: a morning brief, weekly spreadsheet updates, Friday team presentations. pic.twitter.com/7ucKZbAVip

— Claude (@claudeai) February 25, 2026

The timing has drawn attention from users who are unable to access Claude at all while new capabilities are being marketed publicly.

What Users Are Experiencing

• Full outage page stating Claude will return soon
• Intermittent access followed by error banners
• Chats failing to initialize or send
• API instability and elevated error responses

The inconsistency suggests either infrastructure saturation, deployment instability, or backend service issues rather than a total global shutdown.

Current Status

Anthropic maintains a public status page at status.claude.com where incidents are posted and updated. In past disruptions, the company has used language like “elevated error rates across multiple models,” which usually points to backend instability affecting both the web app and API calls.

This time, Anthropic has already posted a concrete remediation note. The incident is in a Monitoring state, with the company saying a fix has been deployed and that affected users should update the desktop app to resolve the issue.

Monitoring: A fix has been deployed. Please update to Claude Desktop v1.1.4328 (or reinstall from the Claude Desktop download page) to resolve.

Users can also monitor third-party outage trackers such as DownForEveryoneOrJustMe for real-time detection trends and spikes in user reports, especially when the outage is intermittent and does not hit every region the same way.