Claude Not Working? Causes and Fixes That Help

Claude not working usually traces to one of six causes: an Anthropic outage, server overload, a usage or rate limit, browser or cache trouble, your network, or an account issue. Check the status page first — if it's green, the fix is on your side and takes about a minute. If it's red, waiting is the only real fix.

We run this site with Claude every day — web app, Claude Desktop, and Claude Code — so we hit every flavor of Claude not working at the worst moments. The catch: the app rarely tells you which wall you hit, and the fixes don't overlap. Clearing your cache does nothing during an outage; waiting does nothing for a stale browser tab. So the game is diagnosis first, action second — the triage, the six causes, and a fix for each follow.

Is Claude down, or is it just you?

Before touching a single setting, answer one question: is this Anthropic's problem or yours? Getting this wrong is how people burn twenty minutes clearing caches for an outage that was never on their machine. Your first and fastest move is status.claude.com, Anthropic's official status page — it lists live incidents per product in about ten seconds. If an incident is posted, stop; nothing local will help. If it's green, the problem is on your side and the rest of this guide applies.

Four checks, in order, each one halving what's left:

The asymmetry worth memorizing: Anthropic-side problems fix themselves, usually within the hour, and no cache-clearing speeds them up; your-side problems never fix themselves. So the status page isn't just step one — it decides whether steps two through ten should exist at all. Load Claude on your phone over mobile data: if that works but your laptop doesn't, it's local.

The common causes of Claude not working

Once you know it's your side (or you're confirming it's theirs), it helps to know the full menu. Claude AI not working almost always maps to one of these six causes, and the "what you see" column is usually enough to identify which one you've got:

A seventh pattern deserves its own mention because it fools people: Claude not responding in a long chat. That isn't an outage. Claude re-reads the entire conversation every turn, so a thread stuffed with history, big files, or heavy prompts eventually fills the context window and replies slow to a crawl or stop. The fix is a fresh conversation, not a status check.

Step-by-step fixes for each cause

Work these in the order your triage points to; most cases of Claude not working end within the first two or three. Anthropic's own guide to troubleshooting Claude error messages recommends the same opening moves — refresh, restart, clear cache, and confirm your account. You usually haven't missed anything clever.

Outage. There is no local fix. Confirm on the status page, subscribe to incident updates, and switch to a fallback task for fifteen minutes. If it's a connectivity failure rather than a posted incident — timeouts, "can't reach Claude," nothing loading — our can't reach Claude error pillar triages the network path.

Server overload. The message "Due to unexpected capacity constraints" (or HTTP 529 on the API) means demand briefly exceeded Anthropic's serving capacity across all users. Wait a minute and retry once; calm single retries succeed where tight retry loops just join the stampede. Anthropic tracks capacity per model, so when Claude Opus 4.8 is refusing traffic, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Claude Haiku 4.5 often answers immediately — use the model picker or /model. Our Claude overloaded error guide has the full backoff strategy for developers.

Rate or usage limit. If Claude cut you off with a reset timer or a 429, you hit a cap, not a bug. On claude.ai, usage windows reset every five hours; wait for the timer or space out heavy sessions. On the API, honor the retry-after header and slow your request rate. Our rate exceeded error guide covers the limits, and why Claude cuts you off maps every cut-off trigger to its fix.

Browser or cache. Nine times in ten, a browser-only failure is stale state or an interfering extension. Hard-refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R), then try an incognito window. If incognito works, the diagnosis is done: clear cache and cookies for claude.ai, or disable extensions one at a time — ad blockers and privacy shields love to break the streaming connections Claude uses to deliver answers.

Network. When every Claude surface fails on one network but works on a phone hotspot, the network is guilty. Disable your VPN first — it's the single most common local cause, since shared exit nodes get flagged and the extra hop times out streamed responses. Then flush DNS (ipconfig /flushdns on Windows) and, on a corporate network, ask IT to allowlist claude.ai and api.anthropic.com without TLS inspection.

Account or plan. Sign out and back in to refresh an expired session. Confirm your subscription is active in Settings, and if you're on the API, check your credit balance isn't empty — an exhausted balance produces auth-flavored errors that look like the app is broken. Pricing and top-ups live in our Claude API pricing reference.

The Claude not working checklist

When you don't want to think, run the list top to bottom. It's the same order we use, and it resolves the vast majority of cases before you reach the bottom:

1. Check the status page. Incident posted → wait. Green → keep going.
2. Read the exact error text. "Capacity constraints," "rate limit," "can't reach," and "internal server error" each point somewhere different.
3. Try a second surface. Load claude.ai in a browser if Claude Desktop failed, or vice versa.
4. Hard-refresh, then clear cache and cookies. Disable ad-block and privacy extensions.
5. Switch networks. A phone hotspot for one minute isolates Wi-Fi, VPN, and DNS instantly.
6. Restart the app or reboot. On mobile, toggle Wi-Fi and mobile data.
7. Confirm your account. Still logged in, plan active, API credits not empty.
8. If a long chat slowed down, start a fresh one. A full context window won't fix itself.

If you reach the end with Claude not working and the status page still green, you've almost certainly got a network or account edge case — recheck the VPN and the credit balance, since those two hide best.

When to wait vs. when to act

The hardest judgment call is patience versus effort, and the rule is simple: if it's Anthropic's side, wait; if it's yours, act. Outages and overloads resolve on their own, and hammering refresh only adds to the load that caused them.

How long is the wait? Most Claude outages are short — servers typically recover within about five to fifteen minutes once load normalizes, and Anthropic usually marks incidents resolved the same day. Even a heavily reported outage that spikes to thousands of user reports usually clears within a couple of hours. Anthropic has openly acknowledged that demand for Claude is outpacing its infrastructure, so elevated error rates cluster around weekday peak hours. If your failures line up with that window and the status page is green, you're in a transient squeeze: retry, switch models, or shift heavy work off-peak.

Your-side problems are the opposite — they never expire. A blocked VPN, a corrupted cache, or an empty credit balance will still be broken in an hour, so diagnosing Claude not working on your own machine means acting immediately, not waiting.

Which error guide you actually need

"Claude not working" is deliberately broad, because that's how the problem first shows up. But once you've read the exact error text, you can jump straight to the specific fix. This table routes the common messages to the guide that goes deep on each:

Working in the terminal? Claude Code adds its own failure points — authentication, installation, and usage limits — that a browser fix won't touch; start with /doctor and our Claude Code guide. Everything else here still applies once you've ruled those out.

Claude pricing at a glance

For the full breakdown of every plan, see our how much Claude costs guide.