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Anthropic\u2019s Claude chatbot recently had service troubles<\/p>\n
Samuel Boivin\/NurPhoto\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This week, AI chatbot Claude went down<\/a>, leaving users unable to access the service via its maker Anthropic\u2019s website, but barely a week goes by without a similar incident at a technology giant<\/a>, government website<\/a> or hospital<\/a>. What\u2019s causing this apparent uptick in problems?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n These days, companies are far more likely to host all their operations on the cloud, which is like the street\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, knocking airlines, banks, television companies and emergency-service call centres offline.<\/p>\n Joseph Jarnecki<\/a> at the Royal United Services Institute, a UK defence think tank, says that if an outage is large and its effects wide-ranging, it is unlikely to be deliberate. Ransomware criminals, who break into systems and lock up data before demanding payment, know better than to tussle with huge technology companies full of experts \u2013 they go after smaller prey.<\/p>\n Tim Stevens<\/a> at King\u2019s College London says that ransomware attacks are increasingly targeting small local governments and infrastructure. Their business model is to break in, lock up something that people rely on and demand a ransom, so what better to target than a town\u2019s water supply, electricity grid or local government?<\/p>\n In the UK, we have seen exactly that, with ransomware attacks against Hackney Council<\/a>, Gloucester City Council<\/a> and Leicester City Council,<\/a>\u00a0as well as the NHS<\/a> and water suppliers<\/a>. Stevens says that for as long as we have had computers, there has been a cat-and-mouse game between hackers and security experts. Unfortunately, at the moment, the hackers are ahead. \u201cI\u2019ve heard, in the last year or so, more people than normal from the profession saying that we\u2019re losing. Not just that we\u2019re behind, but we\u2019re actually losing.\u201d<\/p>\n State-backed hackers from countries like Russia and China are also unlikely to take down an entire cloud provider. \u201cThey definitely target them, but not to destroy and disrupt,\u201d says Jarnecki. \u201cThey\u2019re incredibly highly targeted.\u201d<\/p>\n An example of this would be the 2023 attack on Microsoft-run US government email accounts<\/a>, which were hacked by what Microsoft said was a China-linked group. The wider service was largely unaffected, but spies got access to a treasure trove of US secrets.<\/p>\n![\"Screengrab](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/SEI_287803909.jpg\")
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