Is Claude Down Right Now?
Real-time check on Anthropic's Claude API and Claude Code services, pulled directly from their official status feed every 60 seconds. Plus: what to do while you wait it out.
Want the official source?
Go straight to status.anthropic.com. This page polls their feed every 60 seconds, but they are the source of truth. If you need to watch an active incident tick by tick, their page is the right place.
What might be happening.
Claude going slow or returning errors usually traces back to one of five things:
- Capacity overload. Peak demand hits Anthropic's GPU clusters faster than they can scale. You will see slower completions, timeouts, and occasionally 529 overloaded errors. More common on Monday mornings and after major product launches.
- Regional outage. A problem isolated to one cloud region — US-East, EU-West, and so on. Other regions stay up. If your requests are being routed to an affected region, it looks like a full outage even when most users are fine.
- Planned maintenance. Model migrations and infrastructure upgrades. Anthropic usually pre-announces these on the status page, so it is worth checking there before assuming something is broken.
- Partial degradation. One feature is broken — file uploads, MCP tool use, web search — while everything else works. These are tricky to diagnose because a basic chat session looks fine but your actual workflow falls apart.
- Rate-limit hit on your account. Feels identical to an outage but it is just you. Check your usage in the Anthropic console. If you are on a free or lower-tier plan and running long agentic loops, you will hit this faster than you expect.
How long do these usually last?
Most outages clear within 15 minutes to 2 hours. That is the typical window for capacity events and regional blips. Major incidents are rare, but when they happen — usually during a deploy gone wrong — they can stretch to half a day before everything stabilises.
On service commitments: Anthropic takes a best-effort approach for consumer products. Enterprise customers operate under tighter SLA terms. If uptime guarantees matter for your use case, the Enterprise tier is the only option that comes with contractual commitments.
What to do while you wait.
Three options, in order of how much effort they take:
Switch to Open Code with a local model.
Open Code is an open-source Claude Code alternative that you can point at a local model via Ollama or LM Studio, or at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You will not get Sonnet-level quality on complex tasks, but you can keep the work moving. Same project folder, same CLAUDE.md, different inference backend.
Open your project in GPT Codex.
OpenAI's Codex CLI runs the same kind of agent loop on your codebase. Point it at your existing project folder and give it the same task. The tool calls, file edits, and terminal access work much the same way. It is a decent fallback for code-heavy sessions where you just need things done.
Just wait.
Outages rarely last more than an hour. Use the time for code review, refining your CLAUDE.md, or reading the docs you have been meaning to get to. You could also write clearer specs for whatever you were about to build — future you will appreciate the thinking. Sometimes the universe is telling you to take a walk.
The Claude Code Blueprint.
Five interactive lessons. Install Claude Code, build your first automation, and deploy it live on the internet — all in under an hour. Free, no coding required.
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