Anthropic says it is investigating elevated authentication errors affecting Claude AI and Claude Code, an outage that has left some users unable to log in to the tools they rely on every day. According to the company's status page, the standard channel cloud providers use to communicate service incidents, the incident began at approximately 09:58 UTC on November 13, 2026. As of the latest update, Anthropic had not announced a resolution and said it will keep users informed as the investigation continues, making that status page the place to watch for the next update.

What's broken, and where

The disruption reaches well beyond the consumer chat app. Anthropic's status page listed claude.ai, Claude Code, and platform.claude.com among the affected services, with different components classified as experiencing either a partial or a major outage. Severity varied depending on which part of the service users were trying to reach, and because the affected properties span the consumer chat app, the company's command-line coding assistant, and its developer-facing platform, the practical impact differs across Anthropic's product lineup.

Anthropic described the issue as elevated errors tied to user authentication. That wording points to a problem on the company's side, rather than a crowd of users who all happened to forget their passwords at the same moment.

Users have described a range of symptoms. Reports include expired credentials, outright authentication failures, and errors tied to credential precedence and expired OAuth sessions. OAuth is the system that lets a user sign in once and stay signed in through a digital token, so they are not retyping a password every few minutes. Credential precedence refers to which login method a tool trusts first when it finds more than one available.

Not the first lockout this year

The incident does not arrive in a vacuum. On September 29, 2026, roughly six weeks earlier, Anthropic dealt with a similar episode involving elevated authentication errors and sign-in issues. The recurring nature of these problems has historically produced widespread confusion and frustration among users, who often cannot tell whether the fault lies with their own setup or with Anthropic.

Earlier in 2026, session-token theft incidents were reported, tied to infostealer malware. Those incidents led to unauthorized usage of accounts and to account suspensions. Infostealers are malicious programs that sit quietly on a victim's computer and copy saved logins and session data. A stolen session token works much like a valet ticket: whoever holds it can drive off with the car, and nobody asks for ID.

The available reports do not tie the current errors to that theft. The two situations are distinct: one involves outsiders getting in where they should not be, while the other involves legitimate users being kept out of accounts they own.

What this means for Claude users and Anthropic

For individual users, an authentication outage is a particularly maddening kind of failure. A capable AI model does a user little good if they cannot get past the login screen to use it. Authentication is the front door to everything else — saved conversations, coding sessions, and account settings all sit behind it — so a failure at this layer leaves even a functioning product out of reach. With Claude Code and platform.claude.com both on the affected list, people who have built Anthropic's tools into their daily workflows could see that work grind to a halt until access is restored.

Anthropic's AI tools are seeing greater adoption, which means a growing number of people depend on them. Continued service disruptions could deter new users and affect subscription rates, an important metric for measuring the success of the company's growing platform.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Diego Almada Lopez.

Source: CryptoBriefing