Is Claude Down Right Now?
Real-time check on Anthropic's Claude API and Claude Code, pulled directly from their official status feed every 60 seconds. Five working alternatives below if you need to keep coding.
Is Claude down right now?
Look at the badge above. Green means Anthropic's status feed reports All Systems Operational. Yellow, red, or orange means there is an active incident. The panel refreshes every 60 seconds and lists the last five incidents underneath.
If the badge is green and you are still seeing errors, the problem is almost certainly an account rate limit, a regional routing issue, or a bad Claude Code release. The five most common causes are in the next section.
How do I check if Claude is down?
Three sources, ranked by authority:
- Anthropic's official status page. status.anthropic.com is the source of truth. This page mirrors it every 60 seconds, but if you need to watch an incident tick by tick, their page is the right place.
- Social signal. Search X for "Claude down" or check r/ClaudeAI. Crowd reports often pick up regional or partial outages before Anthropic posts an incident on the status page.
- Your own API call. curl the Anthropic messages endpoint from your terminal with a one-token prompt. If it returns a 200, the API is up for your region and your account. If it returns 529 or 503, the capacity issue is upstream.
Why is Claude not responding?
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. 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, or 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 lower-tier plan and running long agentic loops, you will hit this faster than you expect. The full breakdown of usage caps is on the Claude Code pricing post.
Is Claude Code down or is the Claude API down?
Same backend, different failure modes. The Claude API powers Claude Code, Claude.ai, the Anthropic Workbench, and every third-party tool built on Anthropic. If the API is down, everything goes with it.
But Claude Code can break on its own while the API is fine. That happens when a CLI or desktop release ships a bug. Run claude --version and cross-check against the changelog if the API status page is green and only the CLI is misbehaving. Roll back one version if a new release shipped within the last 24 hours.
How long does a Claude outage usually last?
Most outages clear within 15 minutes to 2 hours. That covers capacity events and regional blips. Major incidents are rare, but when they happen, usually after a bad deploy, they can stretch to half a day before everything stabilises.
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 when Claude is down.
Five options, in rough order of how much effort they take:
Switch to Crush (the open-source successor to Open Code).
Crush is an open-source terminal agent from the Charm team. It is the project formerly known as Open Code, now archived. Crush is provider-agnostic. Point it at OpenAI, OpenRouter, Gemini, Bedrock, Vertex AI, Groq, or any local model through Ollama or LM Studio. You can swap models mid-session without losing context.
Install once, configure your providers in a single YAML file, open it in the same project folder you use with Claude Code. If the Claude API itself is down, point Crush at GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro and keep moving. If only Claude Code is broken, point Crush at the Anthropic API and you are still on Claude.
Route Claude Code through free-claude-code.
free-claude-code is a proxy that sits between the real Claude Code CLI and an alternative model backend. You install the proxy locally, configure it through a web admin UI, and Claude Code traffic routes wherever you point it. NVIDIA NIM, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Kimi, Z.ai, llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio are all supported.
The project also ships an optional Discord and Telegram bot wrapper. That means you can fire Claude Code tasks from your phone while the official Claude Code on the web is down. It is a heavier setup than Crush, but it lets you keep the Claude Code CLI you already know.
Open the 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.
There is also a Codex plugin for Claude Code that lets you hand off a task from Claude Code to Codex without leaving the CLI. Useful when only Claude Code is rate-limited and you want to keep your workflow intact.
Open the project in Cursor.
Cursor is the lowest-friction fallback if you already have it installed. Open the same project folder. Pick Claude in the model selector if the API is up, or switch to GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro if it is not. The full comparison is on the Claude Code vs Cursor post.
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.
How do I avoid hitting Claude rate limits?
Four things move the needle:
- Default to Sonnet, escalate to Opus. Opus burns weekly usage at roughly 5x the rate of Sonnet on Max plans. Reserve Opus for the hard parts. The full breakdown is in the Claude Code guide.
- Use /compact more aggressively. Long sessions accumulate context that no longer serves the task. Compacting every 20-30 messages keeps the working set smaller and your usage down.
- Cap subagent runs. Three parallel subagents each running a 30-step plan can eat through an hour of usage in 10 minutes. Use plan mode first, scope the work, then dispatch.
- Keep CLAUDE.md tight. Every CLAUDE.md byte loads on every session. A 200-line CLAUDE.md across 50 projects a week adds up.
Are the alternatives free?
Crush, free-claude-code, and Codex CLI are open-source and free to install. You pay for the model usage, not the tool. Pointing Crush at a local Ollama model is genuinely free. Pointing free-claude-code at OpenRouter is pay-as-you-go and usually cheaper than Anthropic for short tasks.
Claude Code itself is also free to download. The cost is the Claude usage that powers it. The full breakdown is on the is Claude Code free post.
Claude outage FAQ.
Is Claude down right now?
Check the live status badge at the top of this page. It pulls directly from Anthropic's official status feed every 60 seconds. If the badge says All Systems Operational and you're still seeing errors, the issue is likely your account rate limit or a regional routing problem, not a full outage.
How do I check if Claude is down?
Three sources, in order of authority. Anthropic's own status page at status.anthropic.com is the source of truth. This page mirrors it with a 60-second refresh. The /r/ClaudeAI subreddit and X search for 'Claude down' tend to pick up partial outages before the status page updates, so cross-check those if the official page still says green.
Is Claude Code down or is the Claude API down?
They run on the same backend, so a full Claude API outage takes Claude Code down with it. But Claude Code can fail on its own if the desktop app or CLI has an update issue while the API is fine. If the API status page is green and only your local Claude Code is broken, check the changelog and try claude --version to confirm you are not stuck on a bad release.
Why is Claude not responding?
The five most common causes are capacity overload (peak demand), regional outages (one cloud region affected, others fine), planned maintenance (usually pre-announced), partial feature degradation (one tool broken, the rest working), and account rate limits (looks identical to an outage but it is just you). The live status panel above and the 'Why is Claude not responding' section below cover what each one looks like.
How long does a Claude outage usually last?
Most outages clear within 15 minutes to 2 hours. That covers capacity events and regional blips. Major incidents are rare, but when they happen, usually after a bad deploy, they can stretch to half a day before everything stabilises.
Is there a free alternative to Claude Code I can use during an outage?
Yes. Crush (the open-source successor to Open Code) and free-claude-code both let you keep coding when Anthropic's API is unavailable. Crush points at any LLM provider you have an API key for. free-claude-code routes Claude Code traffic through cheaper or local backends. Both run in your terminal and use your existing project folder.
Can I use Claude Code inside Codex or Cursor while Claude is down?
If the issue is Claude Code specifically (rate limit, bad release) but the Claude API is up, opening your project in Cursor with the Anthropic model selected keeps you on Claude. If the API itself is down, switch the model in Cursor or Codex to GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro and keep moving. Same project folder, same files, different model.
Does Anthropic have an SLA for Claude Code uptime?
Not on consumer Pro or Max plans. Anthropic operates on best-effort uptime for those tiers. Contractual SLA commitments only apply to Enterprise customers. If guaranteed uptime is a business requirement, the Enterprise tier is the only option that comes with it.
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