Anthropic's AI Service Crashes, Developers Left "Coding Like Cavemen" for 30 Minutes

Anthropic's AI Service Experiences Brief Outage, Developers Jokingly Refer to "Coding Like Cavemen" On Wednesday afternoon, Anthropic's AI infrastructure suffered a major outage, leaving developers unable to access its services for approximately 30 minutes. The disruption affected all three of the company's main services simultaneously: Claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, and the management console. At 12:28 pm Eastern, Anthropic posted on social media that "APIs, Console, and Claude.ai are down. Services will be restored as soon as possible." As of press time, the services appear to have been fully restored. The outage sparked immediate reactions from developers who rely heavily on AI coding tools for their daily work. On tech link-sharing site Hacker News, one commenter 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 user recalled a previous AI outage joke: "Nooooo I'm going to have to use my brain again and write 100 lines of code like a caveman." The brief outage highlights the growing dependence on AI services for coding tasks. Anthropic's Claude.ai is a popular AI-powered development platform that provides developers with tools for building, testing, and deploying applications. Anthropic's service outage serves as a reminder of the importance of robust infrastructure and redundancy in AI systems. As more companies rely on AI to power their operations, the need for reliable and secure infrastructure becomes increasingly critical. Developers who use Anthropic's services expressed frustration but also humor about the outage. "It's not the first time we've seen an AI service go down," said one developer, who wished to remain anonymous. "But it's always a good reminder that we can't rely solely on technology to get our work done." The incident has sparked discussions among developers and industry experts about the implications of relying too heavily on AI for coding tasks. Some argue that the increased reliance on AI is leading to a loss of fundamental programming skills, while others see it as an opportunity to innovate and improve development processes. As the use of AI in software development continues to grow, Anthropic's outage serves as a timely reminder of the importance of infrastructure resilience and the need for developers to stay adaptable in a rapidly changing technological landscape. *Reporting by Arstechnica.*