Anthropic hit a snag today when its Claude AI platform went dark, leaving developers worldwide staring at 500 errors and scrambling for alternatives. The outage affected Claude Code and all Claude models through the API, according to the company's status page. While Anthropic identified and fixed the issue within 20 minutes, the incident highlights growing pains as AI coding tools become mission-critical infrastructure for development teams, including those at Microsoft.
Anthropic just reminded everyone that even cutting-edge AI infrastructure can stumble. The company's Claude platform experienced what it called "elevated error rates" across all its models today, effectively shutting down Claude Code for developers who've come to depend on the AI coding assistant as much as their morning coffee.
Developers hit with 500 errors found themselves suddenly unable to access the service, turning to social media to confirm what their screens were already telling them. According to Anthropic's incident report, the problem wasn't isolated to a single product but spread across "all Claude models" accessible through the API.
The timing stings particularly hard given Claude Code's growing adoption among enterprise development teams. Microsoft has publicly embraced the tool for its own AI development work, as previously reported by The Verge. When a service that's integrated into workflows at that scale goes down, even 20 minutes feels like an eternity.
Anthropic's engineering team moved fast, identifying the root cause and implementing a fix within about 20 minutes of the outage beginning. But the incident raises questions about the company's infrastructure resilience as it scales to meet surging demand. This wasn't an isolated hiccup - Claude Opus 4.5 experienced errors just yesterday, and earlier this week the company had to patch purchasing problems with its AI credits system.
