If you’re here because you’re asking “is Claude down?”, start with the official status page. If you want to stop manually checking, set up a monitor that checks for you and alerts you only when something changes.
This tutorial shows how to do both on Zo Computer:
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Check the official Claude status page quickly
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Set up a Zo Agent that polls the status API on a schedule
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Store the last known state in a file (so the Agent has “memory”)
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Get notified when Claude goes from Operational → Degraded → Partial outage, etc.
Prerequisites
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A Zo Computer workspace
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A place to receive alerts (email or SMS)
Useful references:
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Claude status page (official): https://status.anthropic.com/^1
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Alternate Claude status page: https://status.claude.com/^2
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Zo Agents docs: https://docs.zocomputer.com/agents^3
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Zo web reading tool (fast extraction): https://docs.zocomputer.com/tools/read-webpage^4
Step 1: Decide what you want to monitor
Claude “being down” can mean different things:
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The consumer app (claude.ai) is failing
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The developer console (platform.claude.com) is failing
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The API (api.anthropic.com) is returning errors or overloads
The status pages above usually track these as separate components. The monitoring approach below works for any of them.
Step 2: Pick a stable machine-readable endpoint
Most public status pages expose a simple JSON endpoint.
For Anthropic’s status page, the common endpoint is:
That endpoint is ideal for monitoring because:
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It’s structured (easy to diff)
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It changes only when the status changes
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It doesn’t include lots of layout/HTML noise
Step 3: Create two small “memory” files in your workspace
Create a folder like:
- file 'Monitoring/claude-status/'
And inside it, keep:
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last-summary.json — the last successful status payload
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last-seen.txt — a short, human-readable last known status (what you alert on)
The key idea: the Agent reads these files, checks the current status, compares, and only alerts on meaningful change.
Step 4: Create a Zo Agent that checks Claude status on a schedule
Create an Agent that runs every 5 minutes (or every 1 minute if you care a lot about outage response).
Use an instruction like this (copy/paste as your Agent instruction):
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Parse out:
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overall page status (e.g. "operational")
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any active incidents (name + status)
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any components that are not operational
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Read file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-seen.txt' if it exists.
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If the “human summary” changed:
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Email me the new summary
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Include the most relevant incident/component details
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Write the new summary into file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-seen.txt'.
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Also write the full raw JSON into file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-summary.json'.
Notes:
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This is intentionally “diff-driven”. You don’t want a notification every 5 minutes; you want a notification when status changes.
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If you prefer SMS for outages, use SMS delivery for the Agent, but keep the message short (one line summary + link to the status page).
Step 5: Make it resilient (avoid false alarms)
Two common failure modes:
- The status endpoint is temporarily unreachable from your network.
Fix: treat network fetch failures as “unknown”, but don’t alert unless you see repeated failures.
- Claude is “up” but your specific account is rate-limited or overloaded.
Fix: add a second check that does one lightweight API call (if you use the API) and only alert when that call fails consistently.
Step 6: When you need a screenshot (optional)
Sometimes you want to capture what the status page looked like at the time of the incident.
In those cases, use the browser-rendered reading tool:
It’s slower, but it can capture what you’d see in a normal browser.
Summary
You now have a practical “status monitor” pattern on Zo:
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Source of truth: Claude’s official status page
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Durable memory: a small state file in your workspace
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Execution: a scheduled Agent
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Output: an alert only when something changes
This same pattern works for any service that has a public status page (OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, etc.).