Claude Is Down
status.claude.com
status.claude.com
Wish me luck!
SNL skits have these great ideas every now and then, only if the execution were a bit better, they'd have timeless pieces (like the Monty Python's dirty fork). This one was very funny anyway.
WhenI started watching, I was thinking I’ll share this on Teams to joke about the outage…then the third act came, and that it’s definitely nsfw.
The example are contrived, but still very real.
Responsible use of Claude behaves much the same, just within my budget
> Particularly if you know claude is really good at repetitive tasks, such as making sure all the font are the same size so you leave that until the end so you can focus on content.
Surely you can come up with a better example than something that's solved by even the most basic tools we've had for decades at this point?
`ctrl-a`, select desired font in style dropdown, done.
Do you perhaps have a better example?
The criticism people are throwing out here is that while users often claim that they're only using claude to speed up the exact thing they would have done anyway, they are in fact ceding control and critical thinking to claude and just accepting what it does as if it were what they would have done.
People have done this work by hand for years and years, and now when they've been using LLMs to do it 5x faster for a couple of years, suddenly they'd be unable to work the traditional way? Please
> My car broke down and now I'm late for work
> Well you shouldn't have outsourced your mobility to a machine
And even in the case of outage, I can keep my computer running on a battery or a backup generator.
Its great that you can keep your computer running, 1/3 of my information is ithe cloud (which is not a problem at all, even today) and 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.
Its not a problem at all, that a service has an outage. My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke. Took 2 days to fix so what
Of course it does. It's the marginal cost that is low.
> 100% of my infrastructure is in the cloud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
> My laptop also had an outage when the logic board broke.
And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.
> And if you had a local backup, you'd be able to resume your work immediately.
Immediately after buying a new laptop. Or perhaps you mean you keep a spare laptop around? In any case, it's also an object that requires a huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create. Quite like a LLM...
No. I could go by with an older one, or in a pinch I could repurpose my current media server. Or I could put my data in an SSD with a bootable partition and borrow my wife's laptop...
> huge environmentally destructive supply chain to create.
Sunk cost fallacy? If the major electronics factories explode today, the existing computers won't stop working. If any of the Anthropic's datacenters go under, the compute capacity would have to be rebuilt.
That's not what I'm talking about though, the question is whether the compiler does the thinking for you or not.
Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?
> Or do you mean that the question of whether you're outsourcing your thinking to a LLM or not depends on whether you're running it locally? Would you claim you're outsourcing your thinking every time you run a script on a remote server?
In any case, your "argument" is more of an observation that
> Claude requires billions of dollars of operational infrastructure to work
Okay, so does a bunch of other things as well. So what?
Me and other commenters have tried quite hard to divine what you feel is relevant about this fact, without success. Perhaps it's time for you to try to articulate what significance you see in it.
The whole "AI is a tool" argument only works if the "tool" is a commodity that is universally available and still exists even if the tool manufacturer disappears. Open-weights, locally hosted LLMs fit this criteria. Anything that depends on a cloud provider does not.
You have quite strange criteria for what constitutes a "tool", but sure, at least I see where you're coming from then.
Yes. Not completely unable all at once, but they certainly get worse at it fast.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...
Losing skills due to over-reliance on technology is not a new phenomenon and not exclusive to LLM use, but they of course exacerbate it by so pervasively touching so many areas.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-gps-weakens-m...
That seems to be precisely what your study shows as well, though I only read the summary. Say the AI lowered the endoscopists' workload by (for illustration) 20%, so they got 20% less practice per unit of time, which made them have a performance that was 20% worse in the trial. I would expect the same to happen if they got assigned to do paperwork for 20% of their time as well.
I'm not trying to be argumentative, perhaps we're in agreement here, I'm just clarifying my point.
There's a famous talk about the importance of knowing when to use which level of automation, and maintaining currency at all levels you expect to need to use: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
The talk looks interesting, thank you. I’ve added it to my list to watch later.
If the OP had hours they’d probably be fine.
My different smug answer is: I bought a laptop with 64G of RAM before the RAM bubble and would try throwing qwen3 or gemma at it.
Some of us have made different choices and therefore have different exposure to these kinds of failures. Yes, sometimes those choices mean higher costs or fewer features, but a lower probability of getting kneecapped by others' problems is a pretty good feature.
Life is tradeoffs.
Many of us refused to go along with the subscription model, and so are not affected. I've used primarily LibreOffice for ~two decades, and even more emphatically when Excel became primarily Subscription. Stuck with Gimp even after buying Photoshop for the Pantone support, but killed PS when it went online model. Was very interested in Fusion 360, but stuck with RhinoCAD when Fusion was online-only. I refuse to use online accounting/payroll "solutions".
I use Claude $20/mth a good amount, and am hesitant to use Chinese technology, but the last day makes it look a lot more sensible to setup local AIs, even at the cost of higher initial cost, lower capability, more system management effort, and potential compromise.
It's just one small shop, but many others could make similar decisions, instead of going with what's "just easier today".
It's very different when you own your tools rather than renting them.
No. Not really. Depending on the presentation, it wouldn't stop professionals. More importantly, this is why you have backups. It's why you don't wait until the last minute to prepare your presentation, or, if you have to, you are knowledgeable enough to forego the presentation.
Simply put, in this case, absolutely not.
Edit: And to be clear, before you put too much weight on the "depending on the presentation" part, data heavy slides are not what I'm talking about.
Even better, if cave painting was good enough thousands of years ago it is good enough today.
When I was still teaching, I’d do this sometimes. Just do a lecture with a whiteboard and draw data structures and algorithms. It’s often much more engaging than prepared slides.
Yes, I know it doesn’t work for every possible presentation, but for many it does.
And for larger work presentations the expectation even 30 years ago was not whiteboards; that is very inefficient. It was transparencies. But try printing those in a pinch. And finding a projector.
That's not to say that a key tool outage should kill a presentation (and if it was important, do it early); but it is not a do-not-care either.
(Yes, I know that the slippery slope is in jest.)
The professor came in and looked around for two minutes before shrugging and pulling a fresh stick of chalk out of his back pocket and began writing on the board.
This is the same professor who we'd never seen use a fresh piece of chalk ever, he always just soldiered through the nubs and remains littering the board's chalk tray.
We had no idea he actually kept a pack of sticks in his back pocket at all times.
are your audiences going to be exactly as pleased with just the prompt in the center of the sole slide just as they would with the complete generated slides? probably not
will they find AI-generated slides sloppy and worthless anyway? I might, but that is not exactly my business. also I know gcc or clang won't accept a prompt as source file(s) yet
But for many, they use it as a productivity multiplier. They can still get the job done, just slower. The problem is that the rest of the supply chain likely doesn't care, management deadlines likely don't have 'do without AI' timelines any longer, so if we define the "job" as needing to meet the deadlines and not just complete the task eventually, people will find themselves unable to do their "job" without AI.
These both can be simplified as "not being able to do your job without AI", but I propose we have little to gain and a decent bit to lose by doing anything that treats these two situations as the same.
We are all bosses now. Until it gets tired of working for us.
I can't speak for how other agents work, but in juggler the conversations are stored in a cross-model format, so if claude runs out of tokens or goes titsup during something urgent, I can just switch models to GPT and carry on without needing to restart the task.
exe.dev works the same way.
Also convenient to continue working when security rules cause the agent to refuse to help you. Today I got Claude to finish something GPT refused to do.
Useful for - outages - running out of quota - failing agents e.g. because of "cyber" flaging
Since Anthropic doesn't seem to like subscriptions being used in third party harness, do they actually enforce that nowadays?
Edit: CLI in headless mode is an official feature
But I guess Anthropic models are trained for Claude Code's tool call shape (i.e. the edit tool). Does it deal well enough with the MCP tools that Deepseek harness gives the model instead?
I observe that most models can deal well with the tools you provide.
Form time to time I analyze my sessions to see which tools could improve my (or my agent's) work. E.g. a background timer/watcher is on my todo list, so that I can chat with the agent session while its waiting for some shell response.
But honestly with 500k or 1m token sessions, I rarely run out of context memory and barely notice any loss of precision after compaction.
(I did log in and do 30 mins work later on once systems were up but we all have our moments of weakness...)
Meanwhile SEGA's arcade machines have been offline for days: https://www.techpowerup.com/354714/sega-network-hack-keeps-j... and fanfiction writing site AO3 is down for two weeks so far. Then there's the freezer hacks, one of which impacted the French blood service.
It's been a long time since I read COMP.RISKS (and indeed it's no longer published) but this feels like an unusually high level of incidents.
The number of people who had "independent" fiber connections which were routed through the same channel and destroyed by the same backhoe is so high it's a meme among sysadmins.
DC links are now feasible for these situations, and don't have certain failure properties of AC grids (synchronization/frequency/phase).
Besides, what is it that you guys expect from a large scale provider of essentially experimental technology being tuned live as it goes? Is amazing this all works so good considering the complexity underneath.
Get an islanding-capable inverter separating your internal power setup from grid, connect it with battery systems - you can control battery charging and have "microgrid UPS" then. Combine it with solar power feeding as second feed into inverter. Scale battery and solar panels as needed. If you have third input, can add three-phase genset (I recommend looking for propane fueled one if you don't want to care about fuel going bad)
But I was snarking on "provider". There are 100s of providers where I live but one grid and you can't use two concurrently.
My backup in the past has been a local library for internet and laptop power and everything else can wait.
Luckily I can sometimes forget to check my email for an entire day, and it nobody even notices. At least _I_ am not that dependent on it.
Also some safe browsing thing is offline.. we just click "disable it and continue"... people are feeling very safe indeed.
Unless you’re on a negotiated 99.9% contract, you accepted this.
> Great catch!
Its friday, people will just do certain things later.
Utility customer satisfaction goes up after power outages.
Obviously there are caveats to that. They must be rare, have decent communication, etc. But the point is that people will take always-on services for granted and be reminded of how much their lives are improved when they suddenly don't have them.
"What happens if I stop paying, or Microsoft fucks up and cuts off your supply?"
"You get half as smart as you were before you ever started taking it. First month is free!"
"Sign me up!"