Claude AI: Why are there so many internet outages?

Anthropic’s Claude chatbot recently had service troublesSamuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Shutterstock This week, AI chatbot Claude went down, leaving users unable to access the service via its maker Anthropic’s website, but barely a week goes by without a similar incident at a technology giant, government website or hospital. What’s causing this apparent uptick in problems? One of the main vulnerabilities of the modern internet is the shift to cloud computing, meaning a huge range of websites and services now rely on just a handful of companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft. In the early days of the commercial internet in the 1990s, companies used to operate their own hardware and software, a bit like individual shops in a street. If one of those companies had a problem, their shop would close, but the rest would be unaffected. These days, companies are far more likely to host all their operations on the cloud, which is like the street’s road, sewer system and electrical grid rolled into one. If that goes down, then all of the shops are out of action and we all hear about it. Read more'Most of it is good': Tim Berners-Lee on the state of the web now Sometimes, these problems can be caused by simple human error. Nothing highlights the danger of this sort of incident better than the 2024 outage when cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released a software configuration file that took down millions of Windows computers worldwide, knocking airlines, banks, television companies and emergency-s...