Anthropic experienced a brief but complete outage on Wednesday, taking down Claude.ai, the Claude API, Claude Code, and the management console for roughly 30 minutes. All three main services were affected simultaneously; the company said APIs, Console, and Claude.ai were down and promised restoration “as soon as possible.” The status indicated services had been restored by press time.
The disruption drew attention on Hacker News as developers rely on Claude-based tools for coding tasks. Some users commented humorously about reverting to older practices, joking that they might have to copy-paste from Stack Overflow or code like cavemen again.
The outage hit developers across the US, with reports of similar patterns when US business hours begin, while EU users often experienced fewer issues during their workday. The company’s status page noted the incident, and by about 12:55 pm Eastern, a fix had been implemented and engineers continued monitoring the outcome.
The episode underscores the growing dependence on AI coding assistants, especially Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot, and others. Some tech communities used the moment to discuss resilience and fallback strategies, including alternative tools. The outage serves as a reminder that even brief service disruptions can ripple across the software development workflow.
As AI tools become more ingrained in coding workflows, experts say outages like this may push teams to diversify toolchains and build contingency plans, even as they celebrate the productivity gains from AI-assisted development.
