When Anthropic’s Claude AI tool stopped working this week, some software developers were faced with the unthinkable: coding by hand.
On Monday, users began reporting outages across Anthropic’s AI tools. The company’s Claude status page said users were reporting problems accessing both Claude.ai and Claude Code, and that it was seeing an “increase in errors,” and that the issue persisted through Tuesday. An Anthropic spokesperson said Wednesday that the issue has been resolved.
The outage highlights the growing popularity of Claude’s coding tools and how many software developers rely on them to generate and modify code.
Gauresh Pandit, a senior software engineer at Meta, told Business Insider that tools like Claude have quickly become part of engineers’ daily work. When Claude went down, he said, he realized that manually coding might be time-consuming, so he turned his attention to non-coding tasks.
“We may not have lost any muscle, but the simplest things now feel easier to use LLM because it works like a push of a button to get things done,” he said, referring to large language models.
Dozens of Claude users posted on sites like Reddit and Discord, commenting on how much they rely on these tools.
“Claude’s outage hits even harder when you realize you’ve outsourced half your brain to him,” one Redditor posted. “You’ll be writing code like a caveman,” joked another.
Software development has been significantly disrupted by AI. Developers say AI tools are increasing productivity but also increasing overwork. This reduces the role of junior coders. Some large tech companies are incorporating the use of AI into their performance reviews. And across the broader workforce, leaders are concerned about the atrophy of workforce skills as a result of relying on AI.
Department of Defense spats promote support for humanity
Anthropic’s outage comes during a turbulent few weeks. President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s AI tools after the company ran afoul of the Pentagon over how its technology could be used.
OpenAI then won a contract with the Department of Defense instead, sparking a surge of users canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions and protests outside the company’s offices. Anthropic’s app shot to the top of Apple’s App Store this week.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said in a post on Monday
Claude was popular among programmers even before public support emerged after the Pentagon fight. Dishant Banga, a data scientist based in Charlotte, North Carolina, told Business Insider that since he was laid off and entered the job market, he has come to rely heavily on Claude as part of his daily learning routine.
He said he uses Claude for experiments to fine-tune large language models and for preparing for technical interviews. While this week’s disruption wasn’t too disruptive for Banga, he said Claude’s integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studio development platform has made it central to Banga’s day-to-day work. “This will help you code better,” he said.
Engineers at companies like Meta, Netflix, Salesforce, and Accenture use Claude Code. OpenAI and Google offer competing tools that are also being rapidly adopted by engineers and enterprises.
Gergely Orosz, a former Uber engineering manager who now writes industry newsletters, recently surveyed nearly 1,000 of his subscribers about the company’s top AI tools. Claude Cord came out on top, he wrote in Tuesday’s newsletter. “Claude Code is now about as widespread as GitHub Copilot was three years ago,” Orosz wrote.
Sathika Hettiarachchi, an IT student and software developer, told Business Insider that he prefers Claude over alternative models from Google and xAI, making it his “go-to” AI model for his projects.
“I do a lot of coding and problem solving, so Claude is a better option for me,” he said.
On Tuesday, he posted on X: “Until Claude’s Outage happened, I never understood how people (including myself) had become so dependent on AI in such a short period of time.”
