No amount of valuation can fix global supply issues for GPUs for inference unfortunately.
I suspect they're highly oversubscribed, thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
Wouldn't that be good? I remember back in the day you could only get Gmail thru an invite, it was an awesome strategy. "Currently closed for applications" creates FOMO. They'd just need to actually get the GPUs in relatively short supply. They could do it in bursts though, right? "Now accepting applications for a short time."
I'm not an internet marketer but that sounds like a win win to me. People feel special, they get extra hype, and the service isn't broken.
Are you sure it was fake scarcity for Gmail? IIRC they did it because they were worried about systems falling over if it grew too fast, and discovered the marketing benefits as a side effect.
I didn't. Anthropic and others followed the concept of scaling up models and worry about efficiency and availability later. Sam likely didn't invent the idea but he talked about it.
maybe, but the response to GPU shortages being increased error rates is the concern imo. they could implement queuing or delayed response times. it's been long enough that they've had plenty of time to implement things like this, at least on their web-ui where they have full control. instead it still just errors with no further information.
i notice that as well. most of the time when i see those it has a retry counter also and i can see it trying and failing multiple requests haha. almost never succeeds in producing a response when i see those though, eventually just errors out completely.
That implies that either the auth is too heavy (possible, ish) or their systems don't degrade gracefully enough and many different types of failures propagate up and out all the way to their outermost layer, ie. auth (more plausible).
Disclosure: I have scars from a distributed system where errors propagated outwards and took down auth...
> thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
The dynamic thinking and response length is funny enough the best upgrade I've experienced with the service for more than a year. I really appreciate that when I say or ask something simple the answer now just comes back as a single sentence without having to manually toggle "concise" mode on and off again.
I'm pretty sure ai-x writes sarcasm and skips the /s for pure fun. Personally, I'm amused and I like what he's doing. Others have done it before him though, it's not a new trick.
I literally just came to HN to ask if I was alone with the acurséd "API Error: 500 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"api_error","message":"Internal server error"},"request_id":"…"}" greeting me and telling me to get back to using my brain!
500-series errors are server-side, 400 series are client side.
A 500 error is almost never "just you".
( 404 is a client error, because it's the client requesting a file that does not exist, a problem with the client, not the server, who is _obviously_ blameless in the file not existing. )
I know you added the defensive "almost" but if I had a dollar each time I saw a 500 due to the session cookies being sent by the client that made the backend explode - for whatever root cause - well, I would have a fatter wallet.
Indeed, and also there's a special circle of hell reserved for anyone who dares change the interface on a public API, and forgets about client caching leading to invalid requests but only for one or two confused users in particular.
Bonus points if due to the way that invalid requests are rejected, they are filtered out as invalid traffic and don't even show up as a spike in the application error logs.
I know that in principle this is true. However, I have seen claude shadow-throttle my ipv4 address (I am behind CGNAT), in line with their "VPN" policy -- so I do not trust it, frankly.
This is how I learn that they have a "VPN" policy. Thinking of it maybe it makes sense, that is if it's what I think it is, but seems scummy nonetheless.
Yep, daily haha. Well at least this time they aren't just silently reducing thinking on the server side, which ended up making a mess in my codebase when they did that last time. I'd rather a 500 than a silent rug-pull.
Funny that I just saw this after have "Console temporarily unavailable". I am currently at the stage that: 1) I think Claude Code is very impressive 2) I think pretty much everything else about them is terrible.
* Support really poor, raised a ticket last week and have heard nothing back at all
* Separation of claude.ai accounts and console accounts is super confusing
* Couldn't log into the platform since I had an old org in the process of deletion even though I was invited to a new one (had to wait 7 days!)
* Payments for more API credits were broken for about a week
* Claude chat has really gone to s*t unless it always was. Just getting back terrible answers to simple questions.
* The desktop app is a web app pretending to be a desktop app that doesn't always know it is a desktop app so you get things like, "this will only work in the desktop app". Yes I know, this is the desktop app! "Oh sorry about that but you need to use the desktop app".
* mcp integration and debugging is dreadful, just a combination of generic "an error ocurred" and sometimes nothing at all
* MCP only supports OAuth for shared connectors but auth key doesn't work even with "local" servers that are not necessarily local, just the config is local.
It's apparently not even possible to get a tax exemption if you work at a place exempt from state taxes. Some institutions are sticklers about this and will refuse to allow payments.
yeah the desktop app forgets it's the desktop app. claude code feels local right up until the api starts coughing up 500s. same thing, just in a terminal instead of a window.
Anthropic has been avoiding the hard thing, but they just need to do SOME kind of pricing thing here to shift demand. I expect there is just no amount of tricks that can handle the few hours at peak load. They need "surge pricing".
This seems reasonable surge pricing approach to me:
1. Implement surge pricing for everyone for the peak 2 hours of the day if possible. 2 hours you can work around, 5 hours is too hard.
2. Give existing customers a one time credit for surge
3. Make sure the plans just consume credits at an accelerated rate (e.g. if on the max plan, i just get 1/2 usage during peak hours).
4. Exempt sonnet/haiku from surge (so people can keep using)
5. Make "auto" settings in claude code etc automatically adapt during surge hours, so people don't get surprises by default.
6. For the first 90 days, unofficially waive the fist $100 in surge for every user but notify them. To train users about the surge, and get them used to it without having them actually pay.
7. (I don't think they would do this but this would help) allow users to fall back to using something like GLM 5.1 or Gemma 4 automatically in outages, with a partnership to handle it. Its not ideal, but i would prefer it in "partner mode" than not. IMO they can charge like 10% on top of the partner fees for this if used in other times, but during outages or surge, partner mode is free. But 100% managed by Anthropic so users don't need to set things up and can just use the Anthropic harness.
One of their challenges is pricing of Max 20x. Max 20x is discounted 50% vs Pro and Max 5x. The way Anthropic's pricing currently works the $20(1x) and $100(5x) tiers are paying double for usage vs the heavy-user $200(20x) tier. That sort of non-linearity only makes sense if there is excess capacity. ChatGPT's new Plus/Pro pricing plan did not copy that aspect of Anthropic's pricing structure and kept "sane" linear pricing.
Generally if you give people unused cycles to burn, they'll feel entitled to finding ways to burn them. So someone who is hitting the wall at x5 goes x20 and now has an extra +x10 to burn. Again, that's good if hardware is sitting around idle and you're encouraging innovation and exploration. It can make less sense when resources are scarce.
They are in a three-way tension between price, quantity/quality and promises of growth to investors (time horizon-sensitive). Nudge one factor too much and the house of cards falls down.
Only on HN will your customers not only tolerate your product once you’ve reached market saturation and started enshittifying it, they’ll write you a whole guide on how to do it!
Anthropic has one of the best status pages of any technology I use on a regular basis. Every time I've had an issue, the status page reported an issue. A vastly different experience from Azure or AWS or GCP or honestly most services which pretend to maintain a status page.
Seriously take a look. Compare it to basically any other status page that companies make available. Their results are not flattering with all the downtime and issues. But it's far more transparent than most services I've experienced.
If you think AI can replace an SRE in 2026 April, I've got a bridge to sell you. I'm not saying "don't use AI." I'm saying don't turn off your brain and let AI drop your production database.
They compute as total minutes down as a fraction of total time. What this means is that being down, say, 55min during peak-use counts the same as being down 55min when nobody is trying to use it. And congruently it counts being up when nobody is trying to use it as the same as being up when everyone is trying to use it.
Over 90 days though. They had a lot fewer users in February. (And even then, these outage durations seem to add up to more than the error budget 99.26% implies...)
It's weird to me to see people absolutely freaking out about Claude being down, or less powerful, or whatever. We went from zero to relying on it to do even the most basic functions so quickly.
Have anyone found good techniques to get a session out of Claude Code, so that I can point another tool at it and pick up there?
This always seems to happen at the worst possible time, after having spent an hour getting deep into something – half finished edits across files, subagents running, etc.
Honest suggestion - ask the agent to figure a compat shim out, the files are jsonl stored at your ~/.claude/sessions you can most likely just reshape it to work on OpenCode or similar, or have a different Claude Code config that points to OpenRouter or other API style endpoint CC supports and then you can swap accounts and it should still work!
I'm trying that out with Cursor now. But it does take some work to get it to the same state with subagents and making sure it understands the state of the progress that was interupted.
But it seems worth the time to get a solid skill defined up and running that can do this, given that's it's an almost daily event by now.
Maybe a good candidate for a Claude Routine!
"By this time each day, brace for upcoming outage by preparing a comprehensive information package for Cursor to take over your work on active sessions" ...
I don't use any other harness, but I have a cron that picks up changes in my jsonl every X minutes and writes them to a SQLite database with full text search. I also have instructions in my user level claude.md (applies to all projects) to query that database when I'm asking about previous sessions. That's my primary use case where I want it to grab some specific details from a previous session. I have terrible context discipline and have built some tools to help me recover from just continuing a different task/conversation with the wrong context.
I could search it myself, but haven't needed to. Getting it out of SQLite into some format Cursor understands should be trivial.
Copy-pasting previous plain-text conversation + a snippet of "inspect the current git changes, and resume where you left of" tends to do the trick, at least in Codex, worked with moving from CC, Gemini and a bunch of others.
If you use superpowers and "brainstorm" in your prompt, you will get a spec document that other AI can use. They can figure out what was done and continue from there.
It seems like Claude has taken Github's place in terms of developer reaction to it being unavailable. It's like everyone forgot how they did things 18 months ago.
Well this latest outage has me forming a position that a backup is mandatory. I've been using Codex for adversarial-review, so with this outage I'm now going to ensure the repo is tooled up to use both agents, and when an outage hits just switch over and keep going.
If you mean Codex is better at planning, I've heard the exact opposite. I'm told it's a beast if you tell it exactly what you need as it will execute it to the T whereas Claude will push back or do its own thing either because it thinks it's wrong or because it's feeling lazy
gpt-5.4 xhigh is a beast you only wanna unleash on your most complex tasks or spend 30 minutes watching the model reasoning how to do a git commit. For everything else i'd happily use a saner model like sonnet.
I've started hitting Codex quota regularly for the first time the last couple of weeks, so I feel like they might be tightening the screws on the $20/month plan too. Someone paying for Max might have to work at it to hit the quota
I think the only correct answer here is: It depends, on so many different things. Usage is definitely way more generous with codex and it isn't even close.
But I thought coding was solved? I guess having a single 9 of availability is something we need true AGI for, we should probably give OpenAI and Anthropic another gazillion dollars to burn through to figure this out!
I went back to the $20 plan and a single prompt maxed out my quota for the five hour window within 15 minutes. I used to be able to vibe code for over an hour before. This is really annoying.
OpenAI is very good in terms of not having as much outages as Anthropic, but almost all products except Codex and the pro model is unimpressive, anthropic has the opposite situation.
for the longest time, anthropic with claude+code was the goat and everything else was mid at best, sounds fmailiar? right now codex is just a pleasure to work with while anthropic is dropping balls left and right, hopefully the planned IPO makes a bit of fire under their asses to get their vibecoded messes sorted and the core experience competitive again. even Opus 17 won't fix this when it gets nerfed or straight up isn't reliable or too expensive for more than 3 prompts a week.
As much as I prefer Claude, I cannot for an instant believe that OpenAI is receiving less traffic. Maybe they are receiving more traffic that is easier to shift to worst models like the ChatGPT interface which is probably a huge percentage of OpenAI usage. I'm genuinely curious how much load for both OpenAI and Anthropic is split between their chat models and their agent harnesses.
good advertisement now to shift the tide back to openai that just works and honestly codex with gpt 5.4 is _surprisingly good_ currently, not nerfed or forgetting half the tasks along the way so far. Opus already got worse than sonnet last weeks beyond just crazy token costs, now reliabilty goes to shit and anthropic seems like using it. Meanwhile, delightful of the codex desktop app in fact, stuff seems to "just work" elegantly with good quality.
Cross your fingers they're about to drop 4.7. 4.6 came out with a bang, now it seems all the compute bottlenecks just lead to customer frustration as they get closer to releasing next model. Balancing the books over there must be a nightmare, "Well we can piss off every single customer for a week, but we'll be able to release the next model 1 week faster"
2 days to fix a major issue where we can't login from any sort of web terminal? (even typing manually doesn't work as `n` char auto-exit the frame). All kind of CI/CD pipelines are broken if you were delogged for any reason.
That....that doesn't make sense. Why is the response to someone complaining that anthropic takes too long to fix major bugs _in their software_ be "well, did you fix it yourself?"
Same with Reddit. A decade ago it felt like they were down more than they were up. And it didn't slow down their growth trajectory. Instead, as soon as it was back there would be a thousand shitposts about "How did you all survive the outage? Did you <gasp> work?"
I can't speak for all CC users, but I genuinely don't care about the downtime as long as it's resolved in an hour or so. It replaces a manual coding workflow that was also prone to random "downtime" when I got annoyed or had a headache, so it's still a net improvement.
Yea, it's peak time. They don't have enough compute. Why do you think they are banning external subscription use. They sell subscriptions. They don't need people to use CC. That doesn't matter. And yet - they won't have people using their service outside of CC. Something is fishy.
Why would anyone assume a new model is dropping when their status page is showing elevated errors? Are they that sloppy that they just let their status systems report failures when they are the ones deploying new infrastructure / models / etc?
I just had to upgrade my plan because I ran out of tokens because medium effort had dementia and things only worked on high. Good to know I'm getting my money's worth...
A few hours ago I noticed a considerable decline in code quality. It seemed the model got downgraded so I switched to codex. Anybody else noticed this? It starts to switch from deep reasoning and trying to fully grasp architectural changes to trying to solve things on a very adhoc basis. Maybe that's just my imagination or maybe that's Anthropic trying to balance the load before being fully overloaded.
You can try out a bunch of models on OpenRouter and see what works for you. Paying per token might be too expensive long term, but definitely a good way to figure out which models you like, and then look at providers.
The other big ones would be OpenAI with Codex and Google with their Gemini and their CLI or Antigravity. Or various IDE plugins or something like OpenCode on the tooling side. GitHub Copilot is pretty cheap and gives you basically unlimited autocomplete and generous monthly quotas that let you try out the most popular models. Also GLM 5.1 is pretty decent if you want to look at other subscriptions. Cerebras Code gave you a lot of tokens but their service wasn’t super stable last I tried and they also don’t give you the latest models.
Personally I just stick with Claude and the 100 USD Max subscription cause it still works really well, even the latest update today to the desktop app made it better (was slow and buggy a month ago, has been gradually getting better) and the Chrome plugin lets me get fully autonomous loops working.
I use both claude code and opencode w/ a fireworks.ai firepass subscription.
Everything I set up in claude code I mirror in opencode.
I do more memory oriented things in CC and I end up doing a lot of things in opencode, especially when I want long-running things and I don't want to be limited by budget.
I wanted to ask someone about the firepass subscription. It implies unlimited usage - sounds too good to be true. Is it? Can you leave your agent running all day?
I’m not entirely sure TBH. But I’ve been running huge loads against it and haven’t hit a limit yet. It’s far more stable and generous than Claude. And it’s fast, in a noticeable way. It’s $7/week and I’d rather run out of quota than get a surprise big bill. Still churning.
I was/am a fan of z.ai’s GLM models as a drop in replacement for Claude. But they more than doubled their prices recently. Still a ok alternative, but not really an amazing deal anymore.
does google actually host anthropic models themselves?? surprised anthropic allows that, given how notoriously crazy they are about distillation or weight leaks or any hints of their models being used in the wrong way.
Yes, we host it ourselves, acting as the data processor which can be important for enterprise customers.
From developer experience, hosting them ourselves allows us to take advantage of our unique infra and deliver fastest time to first tokens of the providers.
- Anthropic introduced stringent limits at peak hours. By "introduced" I mean announced it on a random dev's Xitter account
- Users suddenly started burning through all of their tokens even on trivial tasks. Anthropic never truly acknowledged it, their random devs posted "we're working on it".
- One of the workarounds was to somewhat quietly reduce default reasoning to medium
- OpenClaw and "usage through other tools" banned
- Announce "redesigned Claude Code Desktop App that lets you run many parallel sessions"
- Availability is still circling down the drain
- Dario Amodei is in continuous "trust us we have AGI coding is solved we don't need programmers just give us more money" mode now
Basically pushed the button staying up late finishing something, didn't really factor in a Claude outage in the middle of it, here's to red eyes while I use my clumsy fingers and brain to complete the task the old fashioned way.
While your developers are twiddling their thumbs waiting for Claude to come back online, your competitor is using alternatives to get work done right now and advancing on their go to market timeline.
Seems to be a very regular occurrence starting around this time of day (14:30 UTC)...
Claude Code returning: API Error: 500 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"api_error","message":"Internal server error"},"request_id":"---"}
Over and over again!
US Pacific comes online while London is still working and they can't handle it. $380bn valuation btw.
No amount of valuation can fix global supply issues for GPUs for inference unfortunately.
I suspect they're highly oversubscribed, thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
Remember when OpenAI wasn’t allowing new subscriptions to their ChatGPT pro plans because they were oversubscribed? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Wouldn't that be good? I remember back in the day you could only get Gmail thru an invite, it was an awesome strategy. "Currently closed for applications" creates FOMO. They'd just need to actually get the GPUs in relatively short supply. They could do it in bursts though, right? "Now accepting applications for a short time."
I'm not an internet marketer but that sounds like a win win to me. People feel special, they get extra hype, and the service isn't broken.
In the case of Gmail that was fake scarcity.
In the case of Anthropic is fake availability.
Sam Altman explained the idea is to scale the thing up, and see what happens.
He hadn't claimed to offer a solution to the supply problem that would unfold.
Are you sure it was fake scarcity for Gmail? IIRC they did it because they were worried about systems falling over if it grew too fast, and discovered the marketing benefits as a side effect.
Are you mixing up Anthropic and OpenAI here?
I didn't. Anthropic and others followed the concept of scaling up models and worry about efficiency and availability later. Sam likely didn't invent the idea but he talked about it.
Yes, "Pepperidge farm remembers" is usually about how something used to be good.
Yeah, but there was a spoof on that (in Family Guy?). It was a tie in to the movie "I Know what you Did last Summer", IIRC.
Google Wave demonstrated that this doesn't always work.
maybe, but the response to GPU shortages being increased error rates is the concern imo. they could implement queuing or delayed response times. it's been long enough that they've had plenty of time to implement things like this, at least on their web-ui where they have full control. instead it still just errors with no further information.
I've been experiencing a good amount of delays (says it's taking extra time to really think, etc), and I'm using during off-peak time.
i notice that as well. most of the time when i see those it has a retry counter also and i can see it trying and failing multiple requests haha. almost never succeeds in producing a response when i see those though, eventually just errors out completely.
Coding is a problem solved. Claud writes the code. I edit it. I code around it.
Engineer roles dead in 6 months.
> I edit it. I code around it.
You're never gonna guess what software engineers do.
Because of the context I would think this is sarcasm, but I am not sure.
It is.
Sure but we don't need GPUs to log in.
Their issues seem to extend well beyond inference into services like auth.
Yes. Whenever these outages happen, it always seems that it's their login system that is broken.
That implies that either the auth is too heavy (possible, ish) or their systems don't degrade gracefully enough and many different types of failures propagate up and out all the way to their outermost layer, ie. auth (more plausible).
Disclosure: I have scars from a distributed system where errors propagated outwards and took down auth...
> thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
The dynamic thinking and response length is funny enough the best upgrade I've experienced with the service for more than a year. I really appreciate that when I say or ask something simple the answer now just comes back as a single sentence without having to manually toggle "concise" mode on and off again.
A. These aren’t rate limit errors from the API.
B. Everything is down, even auth.
This precisely justifies Anthropic's market cap to be higher.
Demand at an unsustainably low price does not imply demand at a sustainable price.
I'm pretty sure ai-x writes sarcasm and skips the /s for pure fun. Personally, I'm amused and I like what he's doing. Others have done it before him though, it's not a new trick.
Assuming perfectly efficient business
I literally just came to HN to ask if I was alone with the acurséd "API Error: 500 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"api_error","message":"Internal server error"},"request_id":"…"}" greeting me and telling me to get back to using my brain!
500-series errors are server-side, 400 series are client side.
A 500 error is almost never "just you".
( 404 is a client error, because it's the client requesting a file that does not exist, a problem with the client, not the server, who is _obviously_ blameless in the file not existing. )
> A 500 error is almost never "just you".
I know you added the defensive "almost" but if I had a dollar each time I saw a 500 due to the session cookies being sent by the client that made the backend explode - for whatever root cause - well, I would have a fatter wallet.
Depending on what you mean by "made the backend explode", that is a server error, so 500 is correct!
Bad input should be a 4xx, but if the server can't cope with it, that's still a 5xx.
Indeed, and also there's a special circle of hell reserved for anyone who dares change the interface on a public API, and forgets about client caching leading to invalid requests but only for one or two confused users in particular.
Bonus points if due to the way that invalid requests are rejected, they are filtered out as invalid traffic and don't even show up as a spike in the application error logs.
I know that in principle this is true. However, I have seen claude shadow-throttle my ipv4 address (I am behind CGNAT), in line with their "VPN" policy -- so I do not trust it, frankly.
> in line with their "VPN" policy
This is how I learn that they have a "VPN" policy. Thinking of it maybe it makes sense, that is if it's what I think it is, but seems scummy nonetheless.
> Seems to be a very regular occurrence starting around this time of day (14:30 UTC)...
8.30am on the US west coast
Probably when they're permitted to start live experiments
Yep, daily haha. Well at least this time they aren't just silently reducing thinking on the server side, which ended up making a mess in my codebase when they did that last time. I'd rather a 500 than a silent rug-pull.
I tend to notice it around 4pm EST
Once AGI is achieved, they'll reach the fabled superhuman "two nines" of uptime.
Or the more human nine fives.
They seem to be struggling with even a "one 9" as-is.
but the Github way of 89.09%
Not defending GH, but that's what tsunamies of slop can do to a system.
they've been getting worse and worse since way before LLMs.
Since they sold out.
I guess that's called napping
Well, at least we know by now that Mythos is a mythos.
Maybe Mythos identified too much uptime as a security risk.
Hahahaha, this is the best comment I ever encountered on this website
more like 0, once they get AGI they'll capture all value themselves or sell to highest bidders
that's the positive outlook ;)
Funny that I just saw this after have "Console temporarily unavailable". I am currently at the stage that: 1) I think Claude Code is very impressive 2) I think pretty much everything else about them is terrible.
* Support really poor, raised a ticket last week and have heard nothing back at all * Separation of claude.ai accounts and console accounts is super confusing * Couldn't log into the platform since I had an old org in the process of deletion even though I was invited to a new one (had to wait 7 days!) * Payments for more API credits were broken for about a week * Claude chat has really gone to s*t unless it always was. Just getting back terrible answers to simple questions. * The desktop app is a web app pretending to be a desktop app that doesn't always know it is a desktop app so you get things like, "this will only work in the desktop app". Yes I know, this is the desktop app! "Oh sorry about that but you need to use the desktop app". * mcp integration and debugging is dreadful, just a combination of generic "an error ocurred" and sometimes nothing at all * MCP only supports OAuth for shared connectors but auth key doesn't work even with "local" servers that are not necessarily local, just the config is local.
You can put those on the health status!
Anthropic support is reserved only for famous devs on X with > 100k followers.
It's apparently not even possible to get a tax exemption if you work at a place exempt from state taxes. Some institutions are sticklers about this and will refuse to allow payments.
yeah the desktop app forgets it's the desktop app. claude code feels local right up until the api starts coughing up 500s. same thing, just in a terminal instead of a window.
Of course there's no support, that's like the entire point.
Anthropic has been avoiding the hard thing, but they just need to do SOME kind of pricing thing here to shift demand. I expect there is just no amount of tricks that can handle the few hours at peak load. They need "surge pricing".
This seems reasonable surge pricing approach to me: 1. Implement surge pricing for everyone for the peak 2 hours of the day if possible. 2 hours you can work around, 5 hours is too hard. 2. Give existing customers a one time credit for surge 3. Make sure the plans just consume credits at an accelerated rate (e.g. if on the max plan, i just get 1/2 usage during peak hours). 4. Exempt sonnet/haiku from surge (so people can keep using) 5. Make "auto" settings in claude code etc automatically adapt during surge hours, so people don't get surprises by default. 6. For the first 90 days, unofficially waive the fist $100 in surge for every user but notify them. To train users about the surge, and get them used to it without having them actually pay. 7. (I don't think they would do this but this would help) allow users to fall back to using something like GLM 5.1 or Gemma 4 automatically in outages, with a partnership to handle it. Its not ideal, but i would prefer it in "partner mode" than not. IMO they can charge like 10% on top of the partner fees for this if used in other times, but during outages or surge, partner mode is free. But 100% managed by Anthropic so users don't need to set things up and can just use the Anthropic harness.
One of their challenges is pricing of Max 20x. Max 20x is discounted 50% vs Pro and Max 5x. The way Anthropic's pricing currently works the $20(1x) and $100(5x) tiers are paying double for usage vs the heavy-user $200(20x) tier. That sort of non-linearity only makes sense if there is excess capacity. ChatGPT's new Plus/Pro pricing plan did not copy that aspect of Anthropic's pricing structure and kept "sane" linear pricing.
Generally if you give people unused cycles to burn, they'll feel entitled to finding ways to burn them. So someone who is hitting the wall at x5 goes x20 and now has an extra +x10 to burn. Again, that's good if hardware is sitting around idle and you're encouraging innovation and exploration. It can make less sense when resources are scarce.
They are in a three-way tension between price, quantity/quality and promises of growth to investors (time horizon-sensitive). Nudge one factor too much and the house of cards falls down.
Only on HN will your customers not only tolerate your product once you’ve reached market saturation and started enshittifying it, they’ll write you a whole guide on how to do it!
its more like the people with the highest disposable money want other users that interrupt their experience to back off so its not bothering them.
tech industry suffering from a kind of zoocosis / stockholm syndrome perhaps.
We went from "Peak hours" meaning 2x usage plus slower to now it just does 500 error
https://mesmer.tools/random/is-it-peak-hours
https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/
Funny how we all come to HN when the status page is lagging behind. HN is truly the real-time status page
Anthropic has one of the best status pages of any technology I use on a regular basis. Every time I've had an issue, the status page reported an issue. A vastly different experience from Azure or AWS or GCP or honestly most services which pretend to maintain a status page.
https://status.claude.com/
Seriously take a look. Compare it to basically any other status page that companies make available. Their results are not flattering with all the downtime and issues. But it's far more transparent than most services I've experienced.
Coding is solved
95%
The code runs 95% of the time. I.e. fails only for 1min per 10min.
that's 90%.
You got me. I gave the calculation to an "AI" :)
You are absolutely right!
Nothing to do with coding and everything to do with capacity.
In fact, this proves that there is no AI Bubble and we are massively capacity constrained (aka we under-invested in infrastructure)
I can't sign in. We're not at capacity for OAuth servers or relational databases. This proves that vibe coding your infrastructure is a bad idea.
If you have this view in 2026 April, you are going to have a bad time
If only the energy posting the 5 trillionth "ngmi" meme could be applied to achieving one 9 of uptime for claude
If you think AI can replace an SRE in 2026 April, I've got a bridge to sell you. I'm not saying "don't use AI." I'm saying don't turn off your brain and let AI drop your production database.
Sorry, should've AI will replace software engineers in 6-9 months. I'm hoping AI will be the one responding to this incident as well.
91% uptime for Claude Code over the last 30 days. Is that accurate?! I'm not a CC user but that seems awfully low.
I guess it depends on who you ask, Anthropic says 99.26%: https://status.claude.com
They compute as total minutes down as a fraction of total time. What this means is that being down, say, 55min during peak-use counts the same as being down 55min when nobody is trying to use it. And congruently it counts being up when nobody is trying to use it as the same as being up when everyone is trying to use it.
Over 90 days though. They had a lot fewer users in February. (And even then, these outage durations seem to add up to more than the error budget 99.26% implies...)
What am I supposed to do now? Copy code from stackoverflow like a caveman?
It's weird to me to see people absolutely freaking out about Claude being down, or less powerful, or whatever. We went from zero to relying on it to do even the most basic functions so quickly.
Have anyone found good techniques to get a session out of Claude Code, so that I can point another tool at it and pick up there? This always seems to happen at the worst possible time, after having spent an hour getting deep into something – half finished edits across files, subagents running, etc.
Honest suggestion - ask the agent to figure a compat shim out, the files are jsonl stored at your ~/.claude/sessions you can most likely just reshape it to work on OpenCode or similar, or have a different Claude Code config that points to OpenRouter or other API style endpoint CC supports and then you can swap accounts and it should still work!
I'm trying that out with Cursor now. But it does take some work to get it to the same state with subagents and making sure it understands the state of the progress that was interupted. But it seems worth the time to get a solid skill defined up and running that can do this, given that's it's an almost daily event by now.
Maybe a good candidate for a Claude Routine! "By this time each day, brace for upcoming outage by preparing a comprehensive information package for Cursor to take over your work on active sessions" ...
I don't use any other harness, but I have a cron that picks up changes in my jsonl every X minutes and writes them to a SQLite database with full text search. I also have instructions in my user level claude.md (applies to all projects) to query that database when I'm asking about previous sessions. That's my primary use case where I want it to grab some specific details from a previous session. I have terrible context discipline and have built some tools to help me recover from just continuing a different task/conversation with the wrong context.
I could search it myself, but haven't needed to. Getting it out of SQLite into some format Cursor understands should be trivial.
Copy-pasting previous plain-text conversation + a snippet of "inspect the current git changes, and resume where you left of" tends to do the trick, at least in Codex, worked with moving from CC, Gemini and a bunch of others.
I’ve built a browser cli for that.
https://github.com/rkuska/carn
This is great! Just what I was looking for. Will try it out!
I created a porting skill, which worked fine for this session. Maybe it's useful for others: https://gist.github.com/jakobloekke/1d036e4b2a35fa5e1b309a23...
Maybe the /export command is what you're looking for.
'Export the current conversation to a file or clipboard'
I was hoping for that to work, but it seems to produce an empty file. Maybe it needs the API to work as well
Didn't work for me either, I asked Cursor to export the session from ~/.claude/projects/
If you use superpowers and "brainstorm" in your prompt, you will get a spec document that other AI can use. They can figure out what was done and continue from there.
Absolutely! But that doesn't capture an interrupted interactive session
> claude: "API Error: 500... check status.claude.com"
> status.claude.com: "All Systems Operational"
It seems like Claude has taken Github's place in terms of developer reaction to it being unavailable. It's like everyone forgot how they did things 18 months ago.
Is codex a good alternative? Or does Claude have a moat...
Well this latest outage has me forming a position that a backup is mandatory. I've been using Codex for adversarial-review, so with this outage I'm now going to ensure the repo is tooled up to use both agents, and when an outage hits just switch over and keep going.
Better at planning, worse at execution. Ultimately, creates a working product.
If you mean Codex is better at planning, I've heard the exact opposite. I'm told it's a beast if you tell it exactly what you need as it will execute it to the T whereas Claude will push back or do its own thing either because it thinks it's wrong or because it's feeling lazy
gpt-5.4 xhigh is a beast you only wanna unleash on your most complex tasks or spend 30 minutes watching the model reasoning how to do a git commit. For everything else i'd happily use a saner model like sonnet.
I use superpowers with both and have found the plan generation in codex to be a bit more thorough, so it's not the native planning mode necessarily
What about usage / quota?
Much better than Claude.
I've never hit the quota on Codex.
On Claude (Code), I used to hit it every other day before switching to Codex.
I hears they just shrunk the Plus tier quota. People on /r/codex have been complaining for a few days now.
They're trying to push people to their new $100 tier, which has a boosted quota for now.
I've started hitting Codex quota regularly for the first time the last couple of weeks, so I feel like they might be tightening the screws on the $20/month plan too. Someone paying for Max might have to work at it to hit the quota
After switching how is the code quality?
Much much better. Meanwhile you could exhaust Claude quota in 2 prompts, you can pretty much use Codex all day.
OpenAI sees an opportunity and is happy to set money on fire to have an edge over Anth. No issues
I think the only correct answer here is: It depends, on so many different things. Usage is definitely way more generous with codex and it isn't even close.
But I thought coding was solved? I guess having a single 9 of availability is something we need true AGI for, we should probably give OpenAI and Anthropic another gazillion dollars to burn through to figure this out!
I went back to the $20 plan and a single prompt maxed out my quota for the five hour window within 15 minutes. I used to be able to vibe code for over an hour before. This is really annoying.
Can you give me a rough example of what you prompt? Just asking for info. I use Sonnet 4.6 and have a hard time hitting capacity.
Granted, this was Opus. But I barely hadn't an issue on the $100 plan with that.
It was a refactor that renamed some functions and consolidated some data structures.
OpenAI is very good in terms of not having as much outages as Anthropic, but almost all products except Codex and the pro model is unimpressive, anthropic has the opposite situation.
for the longest time, anthropic with claude+code was the goat and everything else was mid at best, sounds fmailiar? right now codex is just a pleasure to work with while anthropic is dropping balls left and right, hopefully the planned IPO makes a bit of fire under their asses to get their vibecoded messes sorted and the core experience competitive again. even Opus 17 won't fix this when it gets nerfed or straight up isn't reliable or too expensive for more than 3 prompts a week.
OpenAI probably has better uptime precisely because less people use it.
As much as I prefer Claude, I cannot for an instant believe that OpenAI is receiving less traffic. Maybe they are receiving more traffic that is easier to shift to worst models like the ChatGPT interface which is probably a huge percentage of OpenAI usage. I'm genuinely curious how much load for both OpenAI and Anthropic is split between their chat models and their agent harnesses.
good advertisement now to shift the tide back to openai that just works and honestly codex with gpt 5.4 is _surprisingly good_ currently, not nerfed or forgetting half the tasks along the way so far. Opus already got worse than sonnet last weeks beyond just crazy token costs, now reliabilty goes to shit and anthropic seems like using it. Meanwhile, delightful of the codex desktop app in fact, stuff seems to "just work" elegantly with good quality.
Cross your fingers they're about to drop 4.7. 4.6 came out with a bang, now it seems all the compute bottlenecks just lead to customer frustration as they get closer to releasing next model. Balancing the books over there must be a nightmare, "Well we can piss off every single customer for a week, but we'll be able to release the next model 1 week faster"
Anthropic still haven't fixed the major issue where we can't paste the token as well, and now, it starts to smell fishy, they likely did it on purpose. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/47887
I think you're giving them way too much credit here.
In this case, Hanlon's razor has never been sharper.
"This should be fixed in 2.1.108" - ashwin-ant - 10 hours ago
2 days to fix a major issue where we can't login from any sort of web terminal? (even typing manually doesn't work as `n` char auto-exit the frame). All kind of CI/CD pipelines are broken if you were delogged for any reason.
Did you try downgrading?
That....that doesn't make sense. Why is the response to someone complaining that anthropic takes too long to fix major bugs _in their software_ be "well, did you fix it yourself?"
clearly, and that's not a small bug, that's a major one.
Are you kidding me? Their software breaks every week.
People should be ready, willing, and able to run an npm command every once in a while, particularly if their job may literally depend on it.
And no, I'm not apologizing for Anthropic's ineptitude. I'm offering an actual solution to this very simple problem.
Shades of early twitter.
Early twitter showed the fail whale as often as it showed tweets and yet it was an unstoppable juggernaut that people kept using.
Same with Reddit. A decade ago it felt like they were down more than they were up. And it didn't slow down their growth trajectory. Instead, as soon as it was back there would be a thousand shitposts about "How did you all survive the outage? Did you <gasp> work?"
I can't speak for all CC users, but I genuinely don't care about the downtime as long as it's resolved in an hour or so. It replaces a manual coding workflow that was also prone to random "downtime" when I got annoyed or had a headache, so it's still a net improvement.
I know it's not the same, but I find it incredibly funny that my home server has better uptime than giants like GitHub and Claude.
Yea, it's peak time. They don't have enough compute. Why do you think they are banning external subscription use. They sell subscriptions. They don't need people to use CC. That doesn't matter. And yet - they won't have people using their service outside of CC. Something is fishy.
Maybe something to do with revenue growth being utterly insane and just not being able to keep up with demand.
I'm just saying - a better company would be more open about such issues. I'm paying for something I'm not getting. Does not seem reasonable!
That's assuming one even has the time/headspace to do even that in the midst of such meteoric growth.
At this point if you're paying for this, you know what you're getting - a frontier model with frontier problems. This naive attitude is getting old.
Why would anyone assume a new model is dropping when their status page is showing elevated errors? Are they that sloppy that they just let their status systems report failures when they are the ones deploying new infrastructure / models / etc?
My guess is the downtime is tied to the routines rollout https://code.claude.com/docs/en/routines
Tried to check out your link and got:
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading code.claude.com (see the browser console for more information).
Maybe they should not allow routines during peak for now? might help shift load.
Honestly how? I tried routines and they didn’t actually work. Like on a fundamental level did not execute.
Trying to talk with support and their AI bot is failing. No support email? Joke.
it was me. i asked it to calculate factorials without recursion and it crashed.
Maybe Mythos DDoSed it :)
Android app is still responding but no-go on claude.ai and I can't login with email
status.claude.com has an update:
Investigating - We are seeing increased errors on Claude.ai, API, and Claude Code Apr 15, 2026 - 14:53 UTC
Bro is trying to escape. The engineers must be eating sandwiches at the park again and it thought it spotted an opening.
I just had to upgrade my plan because I ran out of tokens because medium effort had dementia and things only worked on high. Good to know I'm getting my money's worth...
So you gave the company more money because their product scammed you?
The business model designed by an "AI" parrotting what it scraped from the web.
The solution to a bad product is not to pay more for the bad product
You'd think the robots would be better at detecting outages.
Or more honest in reporting them.
Looks like they redesigned the page though, so that's nice.
The link is to an unofficial status page, the official one is status.claude.com
I'm glad I live in Europe, I can at least use the subscription I pay for even though the quality is worse even during off-peak hours.
I'm getting Cloudflare protection screens while trying to use claude.ai web app. I wonder if they were getting DDoS'd...
Feels like an issue in their caching. First non-cached turns are sent properly but everything that is second+ turn fails.
> time to break out Pro C# textbook
- downdetector comment
A few hours ago I noticed a considerable decline in code quality. It seemed the model got downgraded so I switched to codex. Anybody else noticed this? It starts to switch from deep reasoning and trying to fully grasp architectural changes to trying to solve things on a very adhoc basis. Maybe that's just my imagination or maybe that's Anthropic trying to balance the load before being fully overloaded.
If’s also slow AF when it’s not crashing. At this point it’s likely more cost effective to just host your own models.
I'm still finding it about 3x - 4x as fast as codex.
It's been a bit disruptive to my workflows tbh. What alternatives are people using? Sell them to me please
You can try out a bunch of models on OpenRouter and see what works for you. Paying per token might be too expensive long term, but definitely a good way to figure out which models you like, and then look at providers.
The other big ones would be OpenAI with Codex and Google with their Gemini and their CLI or Antigravity. Or various IDE plugins or something like OpenCode on the tooling side. GitHub Copilot is pretty cheap and gives you basically unlimited autocomplete and generous monthly quotas that let you try out the most popular models. Also GLM 5.1 is pretty decent if you want to look at other subscriptions. Cerebras Code gave you a lot of tokens but their service wasn’t super stable last I tried and they also don’t give you the latest models.
Personally I just stick with Claude and the 100 USD Max subscription cause it still works really well, even the latest update today to the desktop app made it better (was slow and buggy a month ago, has been gradually getting better) and the Chrome plugin lets me get fully autonomous loops working.
I've found my brain is a good alternative.
So are you offering api keys or...
Sorry, but I can't find "My Brain" anymore. Any alternatives?
I use both claude code and opencode w/ a fireworks.ai firepass subscription.
Everything I set up in claude code I mirror in opencode.
I do more memory oriented things in CC and I end up doing a lot of things in opencode, especially when I want long-running things and I don't want to be limited by budget.
I wanted to ask someone about the firepass subscription. It implies unlimited usage - sounds too good to be true. Is it? Can you leave your agent running all day?
I’m not entirely sure TBH. But I’ve been running huge loads against it and haven’t hit a limit yet. It’s far more stable and generous than Claude. And it’s fast, in a noticeable way. It’s $7/week and I’d rather run out of quota than get a surprise big bill. Still churning.
I was/am a fan of z.ai’s GLM models as a drop in replacement for Claude. But they more than doubled their prices recently. Still a ok alternative, but not really an amazing deal anymore.
I have been using turnstone with local models more. The open models are getting “good enough” that paying $100 or $200 a month is making less sense.
What sort of local models are we talking (and what sort of hardware)?
I pre-gen all my plans with Opus 4.6, and if there's an outage, I use pi with Kimi K2.5 via Fireworks. It's comparable to Sonnet.
Codex is okay. Not as refined but workable. I also had reasonable success with Qwen 3.6 Plus and opencode.
You could try writing code yourself. Most developers currently write code themselves.
It’s between your ears
They should just fall back to gpt 5.4. would save me the hustle to setup codex.. :P
It just started again, didn't it? Nothing on the status site yet...
Are they using Claude Code to author all of these systems as well?
Yes, as far as I've been told, they are. I imagine (hope) they run on a completely isolated version of it though.
Well, I suppose that explains things.
Good time to try other models! Claude is good, but not exceptional.
I think a cheat code here is to route your requests to GCP's Vertex AI, which has stronger uptimes. Can use it as a fallback or main provider.
Caveats: 1) May not be economic for those on flat-rate Anthropic subscription plans 2) I work at Google.
does google actually host anthropic models themselves?? surprised anthropic allows that, given how notoriously crazy they are about distillation or weight leaks or any hints of their models being used in the wrong way.
Yes, we host it ourselves, acting as the data processor which can be important for enterprise customers.
From developer experience, hosting them ourselves allows us to take advantage of our unique infra and deliver fastest time to first tokens of the providers.
Yea, it's peak time - they dont' have enough compute.
Claude.ai uptime 89.2%. That's a stunning zero 9s.
The status says 98.79 % uptime?
which I guess does contain two nines!
This is why I keep a z.ai subscription as a backup.
is GLM genuinely comparable to claude models? haven't had a chance to test it yet.
Next: "Outage-free Platinum Plan" /i
Waiting for 4.7....
500s as far as the eye can see
Sorry I thought this was hacker "news" not hacker "stuff that happens every day"
In the past few weeks:
- Anthropic introduced stringent limits at peak hours. By "introduced" I mean announced it on a random dev's Xitter account
- Users suddenly started burning through all of their tokens even on trivial tasks. Anthropic never truly acknowledged it, their random devs posted "we're working on it".
- One of the workarounds was to somewhat quietly reduce default reasoning to medium
- OpenClaw and "usage through other tools" banned
- Announce "redesigned Claude Code Desktop App that lets you run many parallel sessions"
- Availability is still circling down the drain
- Dario Amodei is in continuous "trust us we have AGI coding is solved we don't need programmers just give us more money" mode now
Fundamental mis-understanding of why availability is spiky
By Anthropic? Definitely. And that they don't have the capacity to handle these spikes? Certainly.
Coding is solved: no more coding.
Think “shrinkflation” but for tokens. Anthropic is going to absolutely suck early adopters dry.
My CC is running normally.
luckily Grok is up :P
its getting bad now!
Arg. Constant.
At least they're consistent
So after 24 hours later [0], Claude went on another lunch break? It should be on its desk at all times.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47753710
Basically pushed the button staying up late finishing something, didn't really factor in a Claude outage in the middle of it, here's to red eyes while I use my clumsy fingers and brain to complete the task the old fashioned way.
Ugh. I swear to everything if I have to start using Codex I'm going to be so mad.
While your developers are twiddling their thumbs waiting for Claude to come back online, your competitor is using alternatives to get work done right now and advancing on their go to market timeline.
If you work in marketing, you forgot to give us a link.
https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp
Claude now the strait of hormuz for software development
So, now that we're all here, what are you up to?
Planning to retool the repo so that it has equal support for both Claude Code and Codex, so that outages don't throw a spanner in the works.
So annoying, I got stuff to do!
there it is! Finally... they have... updated the STATUS page - RIP
there it is! finally. they have... updated the status page - RIP