Anthropic took its flagship Claude services offline for roughly 36 minutes on August 16, 2026, after an issue that began with users unable to authenticate spread into degraded performance across five products: claude.ai, Claude Console, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. The company’s status page logged the first notice at 21:58 UTC and marked the incident resolved at 22:34 UTC. The first sign of trouble was a login failure. Anthropic’s initial notice said it was investigating “an…