When Anthropic's Claude AI tools stopped working this week, some software developers faced the unthinkable: coding manually.
On Monday, users began reporting outages across Anthropic's AI tools. The company's Claude status page said that it was seeing "elevated errors" as users reported issues accessing both Claude.ai and Claude Code, which continued into Tuesday. An Anthropic spokesperson said Wednesday that the problems had been resolved.
The outages highlight the growing popularity of Claude's coding tool and how many software developers have become dependent on it for generating and fixing code.
Gauresh Pandit, a senior software engineer at Meta, told Business Insider that tools like Claude have quickly become embedded in engineers' day-to-day work. He said that when Claude went down, he turned his attention to non-coding tasks because he believed it might be slower to tackle the coding manually.
"It might not be that the muscle is lost but it feels like it's just simple to use an LLM even for the simplest things now, because it acts like a single button action to get things done," he said, referring to large language models.
Dozens of Claude users posted on sites such as Reddit and Discord to remark on how reliant they've become on these tools.
"Claude outages hit way harder when you realize you've outsourced half your brain to it," one Redditor posted. Another joked: "I guess I'll write code like a caveman."
Software development has been significantly disrupted by AI. Developers say AI tools are making them simultaneously more productive and more overworked. It's leading to fewer junior coding roles. Some Big Tech companies are baking AI use into performance reviews. And across the broader workforce, leaders worry about employee skill atrophy from leaning on AI.
Pentagon spat drives support for Anthropic
Anthropic's outages came during a tumultuous couple of weeks. After a standoff with the Pentagon that came from Anthropic drawing red lines around how its tech could be used, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's AI tools.
OpenAI then secured a deal with the Department of Defense instead, leading to a surge in users canceling their ChatGPT subscriptions and protests outside the company's office. Anthropic's app shot up to the top of Apple's App Store this week.
Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, said in a Monday X post that the recent outages were due to "rapid user growth straining our services."
Even before the show of public support after the Pentagon spat, Claude was popular among coders. Dishant Banga, a data scientist based in Charlotte, North Carolina, told Business Insider he has come to rely heavily on Claude as part of his daily learning routine after being laid off and entering the job market.
He said he uses Claude to experiment with fine-tuning large language models and to prepare for technical interviews. While this week's disruptions didn't cause much disruption for Banga, he said Claude's integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform has made it increasingly central to his routine. "It helps me code better," he said.
Engineers at companies including Meta, Netflix, Salesforce, and Accenture use Claude Code. OpenAI and Google offer competing tools that are also being rapidly adopted by engineers and companies.
Gergely Orosz, a former Uber engineering manager who now writes a newsletter on the industry, recently surveyed nearly 1,000 subscribers about their top AI tools. Claude Code came out on top, he wrote in a newsletter on Tuesday. "Claude Code is today nearly as widespread as GitHub Copilot was in our survey three years ago," wrote Orosz.
Sathika Hettiarachchi, an IT student and software developer, told Business Insider that he prefers Claude over alternatives from Google and xAI, and that it has become his "go-to" AI model for his project.
"Since I do a lot of coding and problem solving, Claude is the better option for me," he said.
On Tuesday, he posted on X: "I never realized how people (including myself) have become so dependent on AI in such a short time until the Claude outage happened."
