Claude.ai, Claude Code and the management console collapsed simultaneously, leaving coders coding like it was 2023.

Anthropic eventually admitted at 12:28 pm Eastern that “APIs, Console, and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible.”

By 12:55 pm the outfit claimed a fix was in place and that teams were “monitoring the results.” 

The meltdown quickly shot to the top of Hacker News, where developers confessed that their cushy AI-assisted lives had been ruined.

One joker moaned: “Everyone will just have to learn how to do it like we did in the old days, and blindly copy and paste from Stack Overflow.” Another wailed: “Nooooo I'm going to have to use my brain again and write 100% of my code like a caveman from December 2024.”

The timing could not have been worse for US developers who apparently can’t start their mornings without Claude spoon-feeding them code snippets.

One Hacker News user grumbled: “It's like every other day, the moment US working hours start, AI (in my case I mostly use Anthropic, others may be better) starts dying or at least getting intermittent errors. In EU working hours there's rarely any outages.”

Another added: “Early morning here in the UK everything is fine, as soon as most of the US is up and at it, then it slowly turns to treacle.”

While Anthropic did manage to slap a plaster on the problem in less than 40 minutes, the incident highlights just how fragile modern developers have become. The prospect of coding without AI for even half an hour had them shrieking like babies.