Is Claude Code Down? Check Live Status Now

Claude Code occasionally stops responding, and most of the time the cause sits on Anthropic’s side rather than yours. This guide shows you where to check live status, how to tell a rea outage from a local problem, and what to do while you wait for service to return.

Above is a live, auto-refreshing check of Claude Code’s status, pulled directly from Anthropic’s own status feed.

How This Live Checker Works

This tracker reads directly from Anthropic’s public status feed rather than showing a static screenshot or a cached number.

It calls the same endpoint that powers status.claude.com every time you load this page, then again automatically every two minutes, so the result reflects Anthropic’s current reporting rather than a snapshot from whenever this article was last updated. If the request times out or fails, the tracker falls back to a direct link to status.claude.com so you are never left without an answer.

What Each Status Label Actually Means for You

The label next to each component tells you how much of a problem to expect, and what it makes sense to do about it.

• Operational means that component is running normally. If Claude Code still fails while everything shows operational, the cause is more likely your network, terminal, or auth token than Anthropic’s infrastructure.
• Degraded Performance means the service is up but slower than usual. Commands will likely still complete, just with longer wait times, so it is usually worth continuing your session rather than restarting it.
• Partial Outage means one piece, such as a specific region or endpoint, is failing while the rest works. Retrying the same request sometimes succeeds if it gets routed differently.
• Major Outage means the component is down for most or all users. Retrying rarely helps here, and the more useful move is to save your work and check back after a short interval.
• Maintenance means Anthropic has scheduled the disruption. These windows are usually brief and listed in advance on status.claude.com.

Past Claude Code Incidents

Recent history gives a sense of how often disruptions happen and how long they tend to last.

Claude Code has experienced several notable incidents in early 2026, including authentication disruptions during high-traffic periods in early April 2026. A separate outage on 15 April 2026 followed a new Opus model release and lasted roughly three hours, from 10:53 a.m. ET to 1:42 p.m. ET, driven by a surge in new users straining capacity.

Most logged incidents on status.claude.com fall into two categories: brief authentication-layer failures where existing sessions kept working while new logins failed, or short degraded-performance windows rather than full outages. Over a typical 90-day window, claude.ai itself has posted uptime above 98%, which works out to roughly 21 hours of downtime per quarter across the whole platform.

Other Ways to Confirm Claude Code Status

If you want a second source or the widget above has not updated yet, these methods confirm status independently.

• Visit status.claude.com to see the live status of Claude Console, Claude API, and related components.
• Open claude.ai in a browser tab. If the web app loads and responds normally, the outage is likely isolated to Claude Code rather than the whole platform.
• Check the official Claude X account for outage acknowledgments during major incidents.
• Search r/ClaudeAI on Reddit for user reports, since community threads often surface a spike in complaints a few minutes before the status page updates.

If status.claude.com shows every component green but Claude Code still will not respond, the problem is more likely local: your network, your terminal session, or your authentication token.

Common Signs Claude Code Is Down

Claude Code shares its login system with claude.ai, so an outage in one often shows up in the other.

• Login or OAuth failures, where new sessions cannot authenticate even though the CLI itself opens normally.
• Commands that hang indefinitely without returning a response or an error.
• Repeated 500 or 529 errors when Claude Code tries to reach the API.
• Existing authenticated sessions continuing to work while new logins fail, a pattern typical of authentication-layer incidents rather than a full outage.

Why Claude Code Goes Down

A few recurring factors explain most Claude Code disruptions.

• Shared authentication load: Claude Code and claude.ai both depend on the same login system. When that layer has problems, both products are affected together, even if the underlying models are working fine.
• Traffic spikes after new model releases: New Claude models tend to draw a wave of new users right after launch, and that surge can strain infrastructure for a few hours until capacity catches up.
• Rate limiting under heavy load: Sometimes Claude Code stays technically online but throttles requests more aggressively than usual, which feels like an outage even though the service has not gone fully offline.

Full outages where Claude Code is completely unavailable to every user are uncommon. Most incidents affect a specific piece, such as authentication, a single region, or one API endpoint, rather than the entire service.

What to Do If Claude Code Is Down

Work through these steps in order before assuming you need to wait it out.

1. Confirm the problem is not local. Load claude.ai on a different network or device. If other sites work fine but Claude Code does not, the issue is probably on Anthropic’s end.
2. Check whether your current session still works. Authentication outages often let existing sessions keep functioning while blocking new logins, so avoid restarting your terminal or re-authenticating unless you have to.
3. Check the Claude API component separately on status.claude.com. Claude Code depends on the API, so if that component is red, code completions and commands will fail regardless of your local setup.
4. Save your current work and prompts before retrying. If a long session drops mid-task, copy anything unsaved first, since retyping context from memory wastes time once service returns.
5. Wait and retry after a short interval. Most authentication and rate-limiting incidents resolve within a few hours rather than persisting for a full day.

Frequently Asked Questions