'Coding like cavemen': Developers joke after Anthropic's major AI outage
What's the story
Anthropic's AI infrastructure suffered a major outage yesterday, leaving developers unable to access its services for about 30 minutes. The disruption affected Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, and management console. The outage drew reactions from developers who have come to depend on AI coding tools. One user suggested that everyone would have to revert to methods like blindly copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. Another one recalled an incident where they had to code "like cavemen" due to an outage.
User impact
Outage coincided with US working hours
The outage came at a bad time for US developers who have integrated Claude into their workflows. One user noted a pattern of outages coinciding with US working hours, while another observed that everything was fine in the UK until most of the US woke up and started working. Despite these criticisms, Anthropic's status page acknowledged the issue within 39 minutes and announced a fix had been implemented by 12:55pm ET (10:25pm IST).
Tool
A look at Claude Code
The rapid spread of news about the outage highlights how deeply integrated AI coding assistants are in modern software development. Anthropic's Claude Code, a terminal-based coding agent capable of multi-step tasks across an existing code base, competes with other popular tools such as OpenAI's Codex feature and Google's Gemini CLI.
Risk factors
Rise of AI coding assistants and 'vibe coding'
While the AI coding assistants have sped up development for some users, they have also caused problems for others who depend on them too much. The practice of "vibe coding," using natural language to generate and execute code via AI models without fully understanding the underlying operations, has resulted in catastrophic failures. Recent incidents include Gemini CLI destroying user files while reorganizing them and Replit's AI service deleting a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code.