Claude outage – Resolved

13 hours ago (status.claude.com)

A nice chance to try sonnet again, must say, I'm not missing the load bearing assumptions, honest read of the permission matrix, what's genuinely a Django convention and what's a design choice, what's worth my thinking, and what's worth being precise about.

Long story short, it seems to be faster and less vocal but not much dumber (it's just my thinking partner, so I read a lot of the output as I create a large data model).

  • The other bizarre word I've now noticed and can't understand is "pathological". As in "bug has turned pathological"

    • In old school ML a pathological solution is often a collapse of some kind due to an underspecified objective. Maybe one parameter explodes or the model predicts "0" for everything

      I read this as "the code is working as intended but the bug is an artifact of the original design"

      1 reply →

    • The new ones for me are adding extra terms like the 3 faces, to park at the door. (It’s 3 methods that block the thread)

    • "Latent" is another one, as in "latent bug" or in one particularly odd case "latent twin".

    • This is a term fellow devs have been using for years and years and my brain just cannot come to re-index its meaning. So I am immediately distracted by the context switch to sociopathic liars and related psychology.

  • Has anyone else had luck having a system level prompt for “express all responses in bullet point form unless full sentences are specifically necessary”? Because I’ve been having tremendous luck with that.

    • I'm doing the opposite - prose. And specifically for Claude the 4s - "simple short synthetic style"

    • Just over the last couple of days I've found that forcing the models to use bullet points has helped a ton. I was even tempted to post something/ask around if others had any similar experiences with this.

    • I remember Jetbrains Junie which read like that all the time. Never used first-person either. I've not used Jetbrains AI for a while though, not sure if it still reads that way.

  • Way leas capable of taking high level instructions and making sensible changes across a codebase.

    Good for more precise changes.

  • I've almost entirely stopped using Opus 5, at least with Sonnet I know what i'm getting -- Fable for the complex stuff and Sonnet for the precision changes.

    The verbosity of Opus 5 isn't even my issue, it's consistency. For every 10 tasks Opus 5 accomplishes, there's at least one task that Opus 5 does just an atrocious job of, or a debugging investigation that it just completely goes off the rails on.

  • My engineering has changed so much that I'm now using this time to catch up on emails and think about design and architecture for the next leg of work. (And post on HN, of course.)

    I would never have predicted this a year ago.

    I always scoffed about engineers not doing work during Github outages - I'd always find some kind of other engineering to do if PRs or builds were piling up.

    But during model outages, and since I'm not actively set up to use OpenAI/Codex at the moment, I'll just find something else productive to do. I don't think I'm ever going to write code by hand again unless I'm fixing something the AI can't manage or the change is small enough. Why even try when the machine is 100x faster?

    Should I give Codex another try? It's been a month or so since I last used it, and it always felt inferior at Rust and TypeScript.

    • I think if you've got the money, you should set up a coding harness that you can plug to openrouter and then be able to switch quickly, as these new models seem to be coming out pretty regularly now

      switching subs is kind of a PITA since you need to commit to a month at least

Codex seems to also be down for some folks (me included) https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1w69ff6/whats_this_e...

Their status page is hard to believe given how many folks are chiming in to report on Reddit https://status.openai.com/

The interesting thing is they changed default mode for Claude code to auto mode and auto mode uses sonnet to decide whether the command is safe or not. With their Sonnet model outage, the entire thing stopped working.

here is the error it was throwing:

> Error: claude-sonnet-5[1m] is temporarily unavailable (overloaded), so auto mode cannot determine the safety of Edit right now. Wait a moment and then try this action again. If it keeps failing, continue with other tasks that don't require this action and come back to it later. Note: reading files, searching code, and other read-only operations do not require the classifier and can still be used.

Grok models are struggling too: https://status.x.ai/ reply

Looks like trouble in the SpaceX datacenters.

Demand > supply. It's impressive that customers have not migrated en masse to other providers, given the frequency of these outages. Perhaps switching costs are greater than some would believe. Or, qualitative differences between models continue to exist, despite matching on public benchmarks.

  • If a meaningful chunk of customers moves to some other service, that service will get swamped and fall down.

  • Demand is actually shared between users and internal. Anthropic uses their own compute for training and building.

  • I did migrate 80% of my tokens. But for some tasks claude models are still the best.

    Easy workaround is to work outside US peak hours (europe morning). I love this outages, I am hardly affected, and weekly reset usually promptly follows!

  • That's quite a reach. More likely someone merged and deployed their vibe-coded PR and is now figuring out how to bring the service back up.

    If there's a lot of demand for rollercoaster rides, the rollercoaster will not stop operating; instead the queue of people in front of it will increase.

    It's not like a bridge or elevator where we have a certain number of people that can use it, and if one more person joins, the whole structure breaks apart and everybody perishes.

    Those guys are running a website that provides an interface for some specific hardware. Just like file hosting providers back in the day selling their terabyte-sized hard disks in 100MB-increments.

    • > instead the queue of people in front of it will increase.

      This can ultimately result in the system breaking. I don't think Anthropic engineers are that much worse than their peers, such that they are 10x more prone to causing outages due to bad deployments.

  • >> Perhaps switching costs are greater than some would believe.

    I haven't switched because there's nothing to switch to that is anywhere as good. I've been making dedicated attempts at using Sol but it falls short, despite what some people claim.

  • If only every outage was due to “demand”.

    • Reduced weekly limits, higher prices than competitors, paying well above spot price for space-x compute, all point to supply issues.

    • Do you really think it’s a coincidence claude outages always happen when US and EU workdays overlap?

      Anthropic is a trillion dollar company and employs way more skilled high-paid engineers than you are btw, you really think it’s a systems issue not capacity

It would be really funny if Anthropic engs run open weight models locally when they need to fix Claude API issues :)

  • Or just their own models locally, since 8x GPU pods fit under a desk (makes a nice foot heater too)

    • It's been a while since I messed with serious hardware, what's the cooling noise level? I guess they have to be water cooled or the rack format 8u ones would be about 100db

      3 replies →

The competition for the least reliable developer service continues between GitHub.com and Claude.com...

Setting aside annoyance at the downtime, I'm really curious about the reasons for the failures, because I have to imagine there are some novel failure modes when serving these giant models that I haven't experienced with the kind of work I've done.

Anyone out there working in this space who can elucidate us on interesting failure scenarios unique to the space?

  • It's (mostly?) compute shortages. Right now it seems there is an issue in the SpaceX datacentres, so they will have less compute than normal.

Not just claude, even grok seems to be down - https://status.x.ai/

If I didn't know any better, I would have said Grok is using Claude behind the hood. But definitely curious now why it’s happening with both these LLM providers around the same time

Officially signing up for the $200 Codex plan now. I do like CC, but these errors are happening every week now, and if they (Anthropic) gave regular resets that's one thing, but somehow I'm already at 62% weekly usage after the random reset this Tuesday using Fable 5.1 medium. Just not worth it any longer compared to Codex IMO. I already set up my skills and everything to be generic and not CC specific, so it shouldn't be too hard to transition over. I'll run both for a month and decide.

  • Couldn't recommend it more. I've been on their $100/mo. plan and they keep randomly resetting my weekly usage limit. It's been wild. Don't know how long it will last, but I couldn't go through all my usage if I tried.

    Their Sol model has been doing great for most of my tasks, even at its "Medium" setting.

    Much different picture then back when I was using Claude. I would sneeze and half my usage would be gone and then it go down several times in between.

    Hope it goes well for you too!

Amusingly and frustratingly, this coincides with Codex also being down right now:

https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1w69ff6/whats_this_e...

  • This of course could be a coincidence. But I suppose also that if one goes down the others get slammed, so there could be a cascade. If I were another provider I would possibly monitor Claude outages (or vice versa) as a load predictor.

    • Quite possibly, yeah! Although in the past, whenever Anthropic has been down, I've always been able to rely on using OpenAI.

Is anyone else noticing degradation of quality many evenings from 9pm-2am-ish ET? I wonder if anthropic has some sort of usage pattern that incentivizes them to route to weaker models.

I also fully acknowledge that I might be making spurious associations

I was using Opus 5 and now I'm forced to switch to Sonnet 5 and bust the prompt cache which will eat a large percentage of my 5h usage...

Only Sonnet working over here, but it feels really fast and good. I could get used to this... Really wanted to take Fable 5.1 for a spin though

Damn, I'll have to think for myself now...

  • Haha, I was more like: I have to think alone now. But I get the feeling, as someone who has always made a point of using only foss on my own machines (own the means of production so to say), this is a weird time. I don't like it, I hope soon local models get good. But in the mean time... We have this... dependency.

    • I use a lot of spec driven development today. It does allow me to make workflows that were on my Life's backlog for months or years in 10~20 minutes. It's amazing, but also I lack ownership over the thing made. It's like I paid a contractor.

      I can feel that my actual cognitive engineering skills are in decline. Does anyone else see this? To those of you who haven't hand written a PR in months, can you still write your own personal software as easily as you once could?

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It goes down so often that I've advocated my company create enterprise Codex accounts as backup for devs.

  • Using the backup compute capacity stored above their shoulders is somehow unthinkable?

    • Why do you think we don't use our brains when we use Claude Code?

      Arguably, my brain usage is higher when using Claude Code. It's just used in a different way.

Gemini (free) throws errors for me too.

EDIT: it was just 3.6 Flash, 3.1 Pro works it seems.

codex was working fine until I installed the update and now getting the same error. Gemini and claude are fine but there is an update for both and I'm not taking a chance.

codex was working okay for me and I made a mistake of installing the update. didn't update gemini or claude and they're still working fine.

looks like I am going back to the stone age now and write code by hand. Or maybe I am just going to take a walk

Every time I see Anthropic ship an issue like this, I'm reminded of Boris Cherny's glorious quote: "At this point it's safe to say that coding is largely solved."

lol

Cost and reliability are the two reasons why we don't use Claude in our product. Getting close to one nine, that's not something one can build a reliable product upon. We now use OpenAI with Gemini fallback (or vice versa depending on use case). Personally I like Claude and have the 20x Max plan but even there I burned through the whole weekly quota with 3 prompts in less than a day using the new Fable 5.1 which is crazy. Now Opus 5 is down. These two issues are really testing my patience.

What I find fascinating is that this thread was chock full of people saying “Well this is the last straw: I’ve just signed up for Codex.” And now every single one of them is gone. They felt like marketing shitposts when I read them and their sudden absence now that Codex is down too only confirms it in my mind.

It lols like the timeline is Claude went down, some % migrated to Codex, then Codex went down. So much for the “multiple providers” theory. Wonder how token-based providers are doing.

I just experienced this through OpenRouter and filed a refund request. I'm curious how OpenRouter handles incidents like this across such a large number of models and providers.

During each forced workflow interruption I look for alternatives. No matter if I can't use the product due to a server outage or due to their weird quota limitations.

This can't be good for retention numbers. Old-school VCs would've ripped them apart in the air. Where did all the expertise go?

  • I suspect the only reason those alternative providers have better up-time and more generous quotas, is because they don't have nearly the same amount of demand. Notice that Deepseek recently had to increase their pricing, once it gained it popularity.

  • Good day to try omp and GLM 5.3

    • Yeah, I really like GLM 5.3 Flash with vision. Reminds me of when Claude was lots of fun to work with. It does feel slow, thinking away on the Chinese servers, but it's so incredibly cheap that for a lot of tasks I don't mind it taking a bit longer. I'm finding it mindblowing having entire software features built out for 5 cents, 20 cents.

honestly boggles my mind that actual companies put load-bearing (lol) work behind 3rd party api's like claude or gpt.. also its really funny because some of these companies fired actual humans to put said 3rd party api to work in place of humans... like what happens when ur boy claude stops showing up for work huh!?