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.

The Samsara of AI subscriptions.

Exactly, 5.5 is the first model that I used that's better than 4.6.

Fable5.1 is Speedy

Someone put update-status-page.pl in a one minute cron job.

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.

Yeah I had a session fail and keep failing.

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

Excuse me but you've distilled this comment from me

It's on the internet now, inside the bellies of 1000 llms.

It's everyones.

Why do you need to say it's yours to use it? :p

I've used some engineering programs that were appalingly buggy for any application, never mind how much they cost - but once you managed to fight through the bugs, they did the thing they were supposed to reliably, and you could trust the results.

This is not true for vibecoded stuff.

Uptime's a mystery

Everyone must code alone

Unfortunately, not a mystery; it's management. As a syseng I can build you a 100% reliable system. But it'll fall to pieces when "Management" takes away our power to require change control, quality control, guardrails, rollbacks, performance testing, system limits, least privilege, etc. Any time you see a big company go down, it's because nobody was willing to enforce what's needed for reliability.

The good ol' Fastly approach. Have your stock pump after you go down because no one had any idea how many websites depended on you.

I've been getting 503s from the API. When I first checked everything was green, then it said "Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork" and I see now they've included the API in the failure as well

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.

OpenAI has nothing better to do than to hack Anthropic?

Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.

Solar flares would like a word.

Claude models don't go out globally either. Bedrock is fine. Azure is fine.

Globally no, but in the US there probably at most 2 providers covering your area + 5G/LTE providers. Electricity - single provider in the area. So if your job is on-site, then entire company stops working when either goes out. You don't really care that another company on the other side of the globe or street continues working.

We already got used to "internal going down globally" when AWS was the main cloud provider. Now its 3, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, but "portion of internet that you care about is down for the entire world" is a casual thing to happen now.

anyone can buy a backup generator for power

No worries, coding is solved they said in February 2026!

Isn't that a good news!

I'm sure they run every model they can get their hands on in internal clusters.

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.

The NSA wants a word.

They don't, no (last that I looked) – if you switch providers, encrypted reasoning no longer works.

They don’t even share the reasoning keys between *models in the same model family*.

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.

There's an ocean between what "should" happen and what actually happens in tech today.

yea, a lot of "best practices" are no longer best practices

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.

There's far more than zero evidence, see https://arxiv.org/html/2402.08806v1 ; or the industry-standard practice of using multiple model families as LLM judges; or even 1P implementations https://code.claude.com/docs/en/advisor (which misses most of the benefit; since you want different model families, with different pretrains and posttrains).

For me, commits are the atomic block; and a good commit should be self-contained anyway; where no additional context is necessary. If an agent can't figure out what a commit is supposed to do, and not do, from the commit and description itself, it's a bad commit, and this has always been true in software engineering.

After claude or codex finishes a commit, I switch console tabs and ask the other to review it; with the commit ID. I often find it helpful to inject a bit of human knowledge, and callout any areas of attention I see from a quick skim, or engineering experience.

Sometimes, I do ask Codex to read my ~/.claude/; and vice-versa.

I don't use skills, but I do have ~/.codex/AGENTS.md and ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. These are high-level instructions for what (1) I consider readable, maintainable code and patterns, and (2) workarounds for empirically observed model behavior IO don't like, such as Astra being a bit of a "over-correct nit-picker". I keep these human-authored, and update regularly based on what I find annoying.

I do all of this before I submit a PR; but of course, for trivial stuff (e.g. CSS changes, copy/string changes, etc), I don't bother.

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.

Who?

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.

It's bad etiquette to not mention you are a founder of something you are trying to plug

If I can't use it I just sit there. That's the fallback now.

Ah, so disabling auto-mode is their monkey rate limiter.

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.

DRAM

Claude outages are now the new go outside and touch grass indicator

Previous: GitHub outage

Oh come on, I just had my weekly limit reset.

Uptime of the Beast

6.66% uptime? Give github a few years they'll get there

"You are a distinguished engineer..."

A usage reset would be a much appreciated apology. :)

Jup, all currently running containers got deleted on my account. Hope you guys got your stuff pushed to somewhere before the outage.

Right behind you with fortran.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Hero ?

What if the twist is that he’s writing spaghetti code that only he knows how to maintain.

Worse, it’s in a language that his llc charges licensing fees to use!

Social Security is more than enough in Vietnam or another low cost of living country.

The issue then is getting a visa.

Social security has a low maximum, if your dad was used to clearing 15k a month and then social security only paid him 3500$, that’s rough.

For the typical person only making around 4500$ , it’s an adjustment, but doable

How about Adam McKay, then?

You've just given them a 50% discount

Talk about a #MeToo movement :)

A safer currency and rate would be $1MWh/hr

Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.

I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.

for those not aware of the reference, "The Machine Stops" was a 1909 novelette by E. M. Forster. It was very forward thinking, and so full of ideas!

On project gutenberg: first story in this anthology, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72890

PDF of just the story: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

One kid is spectacularly stupid, therefore most of humanity is useless?

Yeah seems unlikely we'll be without at least a baseline level of AI unless we entirely run out of energy and components

Asimov rocks! You should look into "Profession" and "It's Such a Beautiful Day", if you haven't.

We don’t even need to imagine that world, Russia is doing it today.

Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.

If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.

I was unfamiliar with the short story “The feeling of power” but thought for sure that “graphitics” must’ve been an Asimovism

Wow you and Justice Scalia should have met!

“There is no such adjective,” Scalia said. “I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as choate. There is inchoate, but the opposite of inchoate is not choate.”

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/justice_scalia_deliv...

Take it up with Isaac Asimov, I guess.

This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".

The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.

Like navigating to the other side of the city without Maps(Google)?

I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.

Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.

The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.

A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.

Hardly a unique problem to AI systems. You certainly can't bootstrap pretty much any industry to its current state without the existing items of its current state. Any sort of chip fab is a great example. Or most manufacturing. Or even more fundamental: mining (both metals like iron, and energy like coal or gas).

My fear was that people like Linus would die and then nobody would be able to build operating systems anymore, because zoomers and below can’t even use computers.

Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.

You go way too far - the leap you have made from some sort of AGI to "now individuals don't have the ability to fully reason on their own" is not clear to me at all.

If people are spending less time bent over monitors or at desks under the dictates of corporate imperative, they will probably be spending more time doing actually interesting things. Reasoning is innately human. What we call "knowledge work" is not and is often anything but. People who are naturally curious will still discover things, even if irrelevant (from a market perspective) when the AI is on, for their own satisfaction.

If such an event were to occur, they would be called upon. It's really little different from what would happen today if suddenly the power grid or supply lines were down for a sustained period of time.

There are many people who have the weights of open source LLMs locally and just need 120v

We hope an average guy who was stuck in an experimental cryopod gets accidentally woken up and through a course of events gets appointed to the presidential cabinet long enough to fix society.

People will have more things to worry about sooner. Where I live, if the power goes out so does my water. If AI is involved in either at any time in the future we will deserve what happens to us.

Also I disagree with the permise. People learned how to make technology that never existed once already, they can learn to do it again if needed. It will take time, which we'll have plenty of because your phone won't be working.

live if AI suddenly became inaccessible

some weeks ago, we changed the billed credit card - something went wrong on their end we were unable to use it for ~8-9 days.

Some pepople during this period said to certain tasks: "I will care about that if Claude is available again"

So, we are already there

There is a TV show called "Alone" where people have to live in a remote area using basic survival skills and very minimal tools. It's interesting, but I've always wanted to see a version of that show where small communities are competing against each other.

If we practiced for these Armageddon scenarios what would a highly prepared group of 20 be able to accomplish in a year. How fast could they get humanity back to the bronze age?

Your dependence on AI is my margin of opportunity...

I really hope there will be social change - flexing mind - like flexing body in a gym/sport - becomes a thing.

[delayed]

Wrote last year about the fact that AIs can be down, and what that might mean: https://max.engineer/failover-to-hi

Seems to be working again.

I have no clue what's going on, but I currently see a total cost of $32**.**, even though I have usage credits off.

Am I looking at somebody else's usage?

Apple App Store build upload processing is also out at the same time...hmmm....I wonder if Apple is using Claude for build upload processing.

Update - All services have been operating normally since 14:59 UTC. We are continuing to monitor. Sep 29, 2026 - 15:30 UTC

I hate it when companies declare victory when there is still a fire around them.

claude has outages multiple times per week, this seems to be nothing new. and this is not ok, for a premium product.