When Claude feels “down”, the fastest way to confirm is the official status page. The next fastest way is to have a monitor that checks for you and alerts you only when something changes.
This tutorial shows how to do both on Zo Computer:
Check the official Claude status page quickly
Set up a Zo Agent that polls the status API on a schedule
Store the last known state in a file (so the Agent has “memory”)
Get notified when Claude goes from Operational → Degraded → Partial outage, etc.
Prerequisites
A Zo Computer workspace
A place to receive alerts (email or SMS)
Useful references:
Claude status page (official): https://status.anthropic.com/^1
Alternate Claude status page: https://status.claude.com/^2
Zo Agents docs: https://docs.zocomputer.com/agents^3
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:
The consumer app (claude.ai) is failing
The developer console (platform.claude.com) is failing
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:
https://status.anthropic.com/api/v2/summary.json^5
That endpoint is ideal for monitoring because:
It’s structured (easy to diff)
It changes only when the status changes
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:
last-summary.json— the last successful status payloadlast-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):
Fetch https://status.anthropic.com/api/v2/summary.json.
Parse out:
overall page status (e.g. "operational")
any active incidents (name + status)
any components that are not operational
Read file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-seen.txt' if it exists.
If the “human summary” changed:
Email me the new summary
Include the most relevant incident/component details
Write the new summary into file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-seen.txt'.
Also write the full raw JSON into file 'Monitoring/claude-status/last-summary.json'.
Notes:
This is intentionally “diff-driven”. You don’t want a notification every 5 minutes; you want a notification when status changes.
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:
https://docs.zocomputer.com/tools/view-webpage^6
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:
Source of truth: Claude’s official status page
Durable memory: a small state file in your workspace
Execution: a scheduled Agent
Output: an alert only when something changes
This same pattern works for any service that has a public status page (OpenAI, GitHub, AWS, etc.).