Rumours have it that the migratory flutterings of end users from Anthropic to OpenAI (sometimes taking a wrong turn and entering Grok purgatory), then back to Anthropic a season (2 weeks) later, so on, moves the great Cords of The Sky that crank the sun and moon into place, which turns the great wheel of the seasons.
If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
Given the amount of usage I'm now getting from Opus 5.5, I'm surprised it took this long since release for their first outage. In my experience, it's about 10x the usage of Fable 5.1 with similar, perhaps greater levels of intelligence.
"Update
We are investigating reports of degraded performance ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update
We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating
We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.
Maybe an increase in sign ups due to people learning of their existence from the IPO? It's the authentication that seems to be failing, not the actual inference.
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API
Subscribe
Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.
Oh no, you can pretty obviously just keep pushing out slop that only half works. Your customers will grumble and eat it like the peons your C suite thinks they are.
For whatever reasons, customers just buy trash nowadays, put up with trash, ignore horrifying contract terms, buy more trash, grumble about the trash, and then invest more in the trash.
Anthropic yesterday: We have perfect AI agents to do everything now, value us at $100 Trillion
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
A more cynical version of me could imagine scheduling an outage to make people think about how dependent they are on your product in advance of the IPO
I've seen many people with 500s for over an hour, meanwhile the status page was green with no issues whatsoever.
Have they tried using a fraction of their immense budget to run E2E tests?
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
Yesterday got email from Claude that they are offering 50% off for one month if I renew my subscription. I bought it today and now this. I wonder if they sent that email to too many people.
Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
When I worked at one of the early paging and cellular companies, every company had phones and pagers on at least one or two competitors for the oncall folks - you can't get a call to fix your cellular network when you are down.
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?
> Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now.
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
If you're not using Codex and Claude at the same time, you're missing out heaps. Even without outages, OpenAI models are great reviewers for Claude; and vice versa.
Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.
Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.
you outline this as a hypothetical scenario but there's this question of what exactly is really going on here behind all these massive amounts of code being produced that could not wait a few hours?
Isn't the answer that you just wait a few hours?
If the AI is giving you huge productivity gains these should more than compensate for time lost here. And there's probably other useful things to be done in that time anyway.
I don't know, what is all that code that needs to be merged so quickly doing anyway, I guess is my point. We keep hearing about these sorts of scenarios in hypothetical terms but where is all the amazing new software out on the market? Where are the products being built in a week that are awesome and genuinely solve a new problem and work?
I don't mean to be dismissive but it doesn't seem like outages like this are really a huge deal in the sense that they stop anything really important happening in the world, if only because when the systems are up not that much new important stuff seems to be being done in the world.
Berget's "Cached input tokens are billed at the same rate as regular input tokens" pricing model is kind of painful for lots of coding use-cases, especially when competitors are offering significant discounts for cached input tokens.
Project completely disappeared. Conveniently for Anthropic, the bug report also went down, so they weren't spammed by my stale complaints after the project magically resurfaced.
92 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] threadIf you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
The Samsara of AI subscriptions.
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.
https://status.claude.com/ says:
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API Subscribe Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
For whatever reasons, customers just buy trash nowadays, put up with trash, ignore horrifying contract terms, buy more trash, grumble about the trash, and then invest more in the trash.
It will be the death of us.
Everyone must code alone
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)
Isn't that a good news!
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
Opus isn’t even allowed to decrypt thinking blocks from Fable if you switch models mid-conversation.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preser...
PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.
8k diffs PR is incredible, is it even sane for a human to comprehend that much?
There has to be a name for such scenario were the handoff from Agent to Developer is so difficult, its not even worth pursuing but to instead wait until the Agent comes back online.
No matter how good of a developer you are, we are still constrained to our minds working memory. Lots of people I have spoken to are aware of this. Agents produce lots of diffs in a fast pace, our minds don't get the time to grasp the changed logic. And then, we an Agent is unavailable all of the sudden, say in the case of it being an outage or usage limit reached, the human now have to go through massive amounts of changes. They cannot continue as usual, there is a spike, they have to learn the new changes and grasp everything before they can continue towards the goal.
Other than trivial PRs; everything I do with Opus/Fable gets reviewed by Astra; and everything I do with Astra gets reviewed by Opus/Fable.
Using only models from a single vendor, is like testing your website/webapp only on Chrome.
Isn't the answer that you just wait a few hours?
If the AI is giving you huge productivity gains these should more than compensate for time lost here. And there's probably other useful things to be done in that time anyway.
I don't know, what is all that code that needs to be merged so quickly doing anyway, I guess is my point. We keep hearing about these sorts of scenarios in hypothetical terms but where is all the amazing new software out on the market? Where are the products being built in a week that are awesome and genuinely solve a new problem and work?
I don't mean to be dismissive but it doesn't seem like outages like this are really a huge deal in the sense that they stop anything really important happening in the world, if only because when the systems are up not that much new important stuff seems to be being done in the world.
Had to shift+tab into other modes and manually approve permissions like a cave man
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