Claude Seems Down

Anthropic's Claude services appear to have suffered an outage, with users reporting issues across claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Many users were kicked out of their sessions and unable to log back in, with the authentication flow resetting repeatedly. Some noted the outage resolved within minutes, while others expressed frustration at the frequency of such incidents.

The discussion quickly turned to cost and alternatives. One user estimated that a $200 subscription scaled through Bedrock/API could cost upwards of $6,000 per month, making it unaffordable for lean startups while large companies can absorb the expense. Several commenters suggested open-weight models like Kimi, DeepSeek, and GLM as viable substitutes, paired with tools like OpenCode, Pi, or Open WebUI for a Claude-like experience.

This sparked a heated debate about model quality. Proponents argued that open-weight models often match Anthropic's offerings, while critics dismissed such claims as "completely, unequivocably, factually inaccurate" and accused advocates of being misled by hype or using irrelevant tasks. Others countered that Anthropic's reliability is overhyped, noting that cloud-based open models can still require per-token payments while offering comparable or better performance in many cases.