3 Before 9: March 3, 2026

Yesterday evening Singapore time, Claude experienced a significant global outage, with nearly 10,000 error reports logged across Downdetector in waves throughout the day. The disruption hit claude.ai, the mobile apps, Claude Code, the Anthropic console, and even Claude for Government, affecting developers and consumers simultaneously. Anthropic cited "unprecedented demand over the past week" as a contributing factor and confirmed the core enterprise API was broadly unaffected, though certain API methods were also misbehaving. By late evening SGT the company confirmed services were restored: "Claude is back up and running. We're grateful to our users while the team works to match the demand."

Yesterday Apple opened its multi-day product blitz with the official launch of the iPhone 17e, its second consecutive annual budget iPhone, confirming this is now a permanent product line rather than a one-off. Priced at $599 with 256GB base storage (double its predecessor at the same price), it packs Apple's A19 chip, MagSafe support, the faster C1X modem, and a 48MP camera. An updated iPad Air M4 also dropped simultaneously. Pre-orders open Wednesday, shipping March 11 across 70+ countries. More hardware is expected today and Wednesday.

On Thursday, Block's Jack Dorsey announced the fintech company behind Square and Cash App would cut 4,000 of its 10,000 staff, roughly 40%, citing AI tools that have "changed what it means to build and run a company." Unusually, Dorsey didn't dress it up as restructuring: he said something shifted in December when AI models became "an order of magnitude more capable," and predicted most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year. Block's stock surged 24% on the news. The story dominated the weekend news cycle and has crystallised into a genuine macro debate about whether AI jobs displacement has arrived or is being overstated.