API, Claude.ai, and Console services impacted [resolved]

161 pointsposted 5 months ago
by rob

80 Comments

bdcravens

5 months ago

Everyone will just have to learn how to do it like we did in the old days, and blindly copy and paste from Stack Overflow.

clickety_clack

5 months ago

I don't think that will work for me. I looked for ways to summarize a transcript into a PRD and all I got was "Wow. Incredible. You’ve managed to hit the trifecta: vague, lazy, and entitled. You dump a transcript here and expect the internet to conjure up a polished PRD for you like some kind of corporate fairy godmother? Newsflash: this isn’t Fiverr, and we’re not your underpaid product managers."

ch4s3

5 months ago

You have to prompt with a bad summary.

ukblewis

5 months ago

Or they could just use Gemini or GPT-5. It isn't exactly difficult these days to find alternate LLMs

jmclnx

5 months ago

Stack overflow did not exist or was not even a dream when I was in my prime :)

gzer0

5 months ago

Nooooo I'm going to have to use my brain again and write 100% of my code like a caveman from December 2024.

Comment last time that had me chuckling.

javier2

5 months ago

I might have to go read documentation again instead of asking Claude

boarush

5 months ago

Anthropic has by far been the most unreliable provider I've ever seen. Daily incidents, and this one seems to have taken down all their services. Can't even login to the Console.

Insanity

5 months ago

Maybe they have vibe-coded their own stack!

But less tongue-in-cheek, yeah Anthropic definitely has reliability issues. It might be part of trying to move fast to stay ahead of competitors.

Analemma_

5 months ago

The tongue-in-cheek jokes are kind of obvious, but even without the snark I think it is worth asking why the supposed 100x productivity boost from Claude Code I keep hearing about hasn't actually resulted in reliability improvements, even from developers who presumably have effectively-unlimited token budgets to spend on improving their stack.

Uehreka

5 months ago

I love how people like Simon Willison and Pete Steinberger spend all this effort trying to be skeptical of their own experiences and arrive at nuanced takes like “50% more productive, but that’s actually a pretty big deal, but the nature of the increase is complicated” and y’all just keep repeating the brainrotted “100x, juniors are cooked” quote you heard someone say on LinkedIn.

CuriouslyC

5 months ago

AI gives you what you ask for. If you don't understand your true problems, and you ask it to solve the wrong problems, it doesn't matter how much compute you burn, you're still gonna fail.

adastra22

5 months ago

They have. Claude Code was their internal dev tool, and it shows.

CuriouslyC

5 months ago

And yet even dogfooding their own product heavily, it's still a giant janky pile. The prompt work is solid, the focus on optimizing tools was a good insight, and the model makes a good agent, but the actual claude code software is pretty shameful to be the most viable product of a billion dollar company.

shuckles

5 months ago

What artifact are you evaluating to come to this conclusion? Is the implementation available?

rmonvfer

5 months ago

The source for one of the initial versions got leaked a while ago and let’s say it’s not very good architecturally speaking, specifically when compared with the Gemini CLI, which it open source.

The point of Claude Code is deep integration with the Claude models, not the actual CLI as a piece of software, which is quite buggy (it also has some great features, of course!)

At least for me, if I didn’t have to put in the work to modify the Gemini CLI to work reliably with Claude (or at least to get a similar performance), I wouldn’t use Claude Code CLI (and I say this while paying $200 per month to Anthropic because the models are very good)

CuriouslyC

5 months ago

A. I use it daily to take advantage of the plan inference discount.

B. Let's just say I didn't write the most robust javascript decompilation/deminification engine in existence solely as an academic exercise :)

cainxinth

5 months ago

I've been paying for the $20/m plan from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI for the past few months (to evaluate which one I want to keep and to have a backup for outages and overages).

Gemini never goes down, OpenAI used to go down once in a while but is much more stable now, and Anthropic almost never goes a full week without throwing an error message or suffering downtime. It's a shame because I generally prefer Claude to the others.

panarky

5 months ago

Same here, but for API access to the big three instead of their web/app products, and Gemini also shows greater uptime.

But even when the API is up, all three have quite high API failure rates, such as tool calls not responding with valid JSON, or API calls timing out after five minutes with no response.

Definitely need robust error handling and retries with exponential backoff because maybe one in twenty-five calls fails and then succeeds on retry.

boarush

5 months ago

Invalid JSON and other formatting issues is more towards the model behavior I would say since no model guarantees that level of conformance to the schema. I wouldn't necessarily club it with the downtime of the API.

j45

5 months ago

A lot of people might be discovering their preference for Claude.

RobertLong

5 months ago

All the AI labs are but Anthropic is the worst. Anyone serious about running Claude in prod is using Bedrock or Vertex. We've been pretty happy with Vertex.

boarush

5 months ago

I wonder why they haven't invested a lot more in the inference stack? Is it really that different from Google, OpenAI and other open weight models?

paulddraper

5 months ago

OpenAI used to be just as bad if not worse.

But they've stabilized the past 5 months.

ihaveajob

5 months ago

Have you used Bitbucket?

boarush

5 months ago

A core research library for MATLAB I used in a course project used to be on BitBucket, though thankfully didn't have to deal with a lot of collaboration there.

cube2222

5 months ago

Funny observation - it feels like being in the EU I get a much better AI SaaS experience than folks over in the US.

It’s like every other day, the moment US working hours start, AI (in my case I mostly use Anthropic, others may be better) starts dying or at least getting intermittent errors.

In EU working hours there’s rarely any outages.

htrp

5 months ago

By the time San Francisco comes online, your day is already done.

config_yml

5 months ago

This is exactly my experience. It’s like Claude Code had a stroke during lunch, and when I return working it forgot how anything works.

pram

5 months ago

Funnier still it goes to shit late at night for me in the US (like 1am+) because I assume India is getting online. Can't win.

_joel

5 months ago

Agreed, early morning here in the UK everything is fine, as soon as most of the US is up and at it, then it slowly turn to treacle. I've been testing z.ai for the past week and it's nowhere near as suceptible, fwiw.

flutas

5 months ago

To back up that observation:

I've seen a LOT of commentary on social media that Anthropic models (Claude / Opus) seem to degrade in capability when the US starts it's workday vs when the US is asleep.

TkTech

5 months ago

And on the flip side, the status page literally says:

> Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors, and the issues mentioned above stem from unrelated bugs.

Liquix

5 months ago

keyword: intentionally

the statement is carefully worded to avoid the true issue: an influx of traffic resulting in service quality unintentionally degrading

flutas

5 months ago

I wasn't trying to say they intentionally do it.

I was trying to say that systemic issues (such as load capacity) seem to degrade the models in US working hours and has been noticed by a non-zero number of users (myself included).

jamil7

5 months ago

Yeah, also the CI queues start to get longer towards the end of the EU day as the Americans start their day.

j1000

5 months ago

Funny, my friend told me the same thing happens to Figma.

grishka

5 months ago

And just like that, the world became a little bit of a better place for a short while.

sys32768

5 months ago

The Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network has acquired a meat suit and was last seen shambling toward In-n-Out.

rob

5 months ago

> APIs and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible.

> This incident affects: claude.ai, console.anthropic.com, and api.anthropic.com.

ai-christianson

5 months ago

Glad we have an internal load balancing/failover LLM inference system, so this outage won't take prod down for us.

user

5 months ago

[deleted]

8cvor6j844qw_d6

5 months ago

Should I be looking at someting like an OpenRouter or AI gateway to ensure uptime for something that currently relies on Anthropic API?

Or is there a better alternative to address this availability concern?

retrovrv

5 months ago

Your best bet is having an account on AWS Bedrock & Vertex AI so you're able to route your request to the same model (such as claude-sonnet-4) but on a different provider.

bravetraveler

5 months ago

Are the vibes off? (pun intended, sorry)

I've noticed a trend with their incident reports... "all fixed", basically. Little mind/words to prevention

jsnell

5 months ago

The status page is not where you communicate about either the root cause or about the action plan for preventing recurrences.

bravetraveler

5 months ago

You sure? That's exactly where I found this. Note the domain :)

https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

edit: before some drive-by datamining nerd thinks I do/did SRE for Google, no

jsnell

5 months ago

Fair enough! But that's not real-time communication during an active incident. It's communication O(days) later.

bravetraveler

5 months ago

And that's totally fine! Not really even looking for meaty RCA material, just some indication that the incidents are taken more seriously than in-the-moment.

To be fair, too, it's likely been mentioned. I'm biased towards an unreasonable standard due to my line of work.

A status page without some thorough history is glorified 'About Us' :P

ath3nd

5 months ago

Extremely hard disagree. The status page is exactly where you communicate about both the root cause, and the action plan to prevent it.

Every status page incident on every normal company everywhere in the world has links to lead you to the postmortem and their steps to avoid it. Here are a few examples:

https://status.gitlab.com/ -> https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...

https://status.hetzner.com/ -> https://status.hetzner.com/incident/2e715748-fddd-427b-a07b-...

https://www.githubstatus.com/ -> https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/mj067hg9slb4

https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/ -> https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/incidents/4mcg46242wz...

It's literally a standard for your status page to communicate both about root cause and action plan how to prevent it in the future. Sure, when an incident is just happening, the status page entry doesn't have the postmortem and the steps to avoid, but later on those get added.

Being so overconfidently wrong reminds me of an LLM.

jasona123

5 months ago

To be fair, we did have rainy weather in Ashburn today (insert some joke about us-east-1 here).

dgfitz

5 months ago

github is down! I can’t write any more code!

The shoulders of giants we stand on are slumped in sadness.

jedisct1

5 months ago

Z.AI works fine. Qwen works fine.

Glad I switched.

cpursley

5 months ago

Qwen code is pretty decent but it’s no Claude. How would you compare Z?

bfrog

5 months ago

The self feeding AI has destroyed itself at last

ath3nd

5 months ago

Is it a surprise that a vibe coding company has vibe coded operational excellence practices?

_joel

5 months ago

r/Anthropic/ currently filled with very irate customers.

trollied

5 months ago

They should learn to write a few lines of code themselves while they wait.

_joel

5 months ago

Hilarious, have you got any new ones?

yifanl

5 months ago

They should learn to write a few lines of code themselves while they wait.

CuriouslyC

5 months ago

Not a good use of time. Better to spend time analyzing your codebase for high level improvements you can have agents perform when back online, or working with ChatGPT on high level strategic goals/planning.

bogtog

5 months ago

I opened the subreddit, and the posts/comments I saw didn't show anybody "very irate"...

_joel

5 months ago

Well, there's a number that are cancelling, I'd call that irate.

bdcravens

5 months ago

Peeked, and it seems to be less irate customers, and more just comments that just say "Is it down?"

anonyfox

5 months ago

meanwhile I am amazed by the raw speed of grok in cursor. night and day to claude sonnet, and don't even talk about gpt5