Developers joke about “coding like cavemen” as AI service suffers major outage

On Wednesday afternoon, Anthropic's AI infrastructure experienced a significant outage, rendering its services completely inaccessible for about half an hour. This disruption affected several key offerings, including Claude.ai, the API, and Claude Code. At 12:28 PM Eastern Time, the company acknowledged the issue, stating, "APIs, Console, and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible." Fortunately, by the time of this report, the services had been restored. However, the brief interruption captured the attention of the tech community, quickly rising to the top of Hacker News, where developers shared their frustrations. Many noted their increasing reliance on AI coding tools for daily tasks, leading to humorous quips about reverting to older coding practices. One user on Hacker News joked, "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 commenter referenced a previous outage, humorously lamenting, "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 of this outage was particularly unfortunate, impacting developers throughout the United States who have incorporated Claude into their workflows. Observations from users indicated a recurring pattern where service interruptions often coincide with the start of US working hours, while European users reported fewer issues during their peak times. One user commented, "It's like every other day, the moment US working hours start, AI, in my case mostly Anthropic, starts dying or at least getting intermittent errors." Despite criticism regarding Anthropic's reliability in recent months, the company promptly addressed the issue, acknowledging its occurrence within 39 minutes of initial reports. By 12:55 PM Eastern, a fix had been implemented, and the team began monitoring the service's stability.