I was going to get so much done Wednesday. Build a research tool. Finish my taxes. Come up with a 10-year life plan.
But everything had to stop. Because disaster struck: Claude went down.
For about an hour, from just before 7 a.m. to just after 8 a.m., queries to Anthropic’s chatbot were met with an API 500 error code. And for many people here in the city of Claude’s birth, this was cause for legitimate panic.
Across the Bay Area, home to Claude’s most dedicated fans and loyal servants, people spent the morning frantically typing into their search engines, “Is Claude down? (opens in new tab)” Google search results for the phrase surged 500%.
At The Standard, our CEO came into Slack to alert everyone to the crisis. “Are others seeing “this isn’t working” in Claude rn?” We were, sir.
Memes, of course, became the copium (opens in new tab) of the masses.
My favorite internet sleuth, Jane Manchun Wong, shared a screenshot of the Claude status page, noting the visual similarity to Jeff Bezos’ Whole Foods house brand. This joke did not help those of us who needed to access Claude, but I found it slightly soothing to be distracted for a minute by colors.
At 8:30, I decided to try again. I managed to load Claude and asked it, “Are you down?” It said no. I asked it, “Were you down this morning?” It said, with an odd amount of enthusiasm, “Yes, there was indeed an outage today!”
“Were you also down a few days ago?” I asked, having seen tweets suggesting as much on Monday. Again, Claude was impressed with my knowledge. “Yes, there was! On April 13, 2026, hundreds of users reported intermittent HTTP 500 internal server errors across claude.ai (opens in new tab), the API, and Claude Code. The outage lasted about 55 minutes.”
It was during that outage that one engineer on X tweeted, (opens in new tab) “Claude Code is down right now and suddenly half the software industry has to remember how to think.”
Claude going down is becoming common, apparently. One Reddit post Wednesday morning merely stated, “Claude is down AGAIN?” (opens in new tab)
Someone in the Claude subreddit said the cause was likely the resource bottleneck created at this time of day as “west coast wakes up, ruins the party for everyone else.”
But it could also be that all the procrastinators of America were relying on Claude to wrap up their tax returns.
As Claude put it in our chat, “It’s been a pretty rough stretch — April alone has seen outages on April 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, and 15.”
Representatives at Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment. I asked Claude, and it was sad to report that it didn’t know what was going on either. The chatbot, like many of us, doesn’t have perfect insight into its moods and inner workings. Chatbots might be able to file our IRS claims, but they struggle to know themselves.
The good news is, Claude is back, and now it’s too busy doing everyone’s work for them to worry about its infrastructure.
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