Anthropic API Down Right Now? Check This

When every request starts failing at once, the first job is to separate a genuine outage from a problem in your own integration.

1. Read the status signal first

Check the live status here. A widespread incident shows as sustained 5xx or 529 responses across models and regions.

2. Identify the status code

A 529 means the service is overloaded — see Anthropic API 529 overloaded. A 500 or 503 is server side. A 401 or 429 is not an outage: those are authentication and rate-limit problems on your account.

3. Test with a minimal request

Send one small request with a short prompt and the smallest model. If that succeeds, the outage is partial and likely model-specific — switch models temporarily.

4. Retry with exponential backoff

Retry after 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 seconds with jitter, and cap total attempts. Hammering an overloaded endpoint extends your own recovery time.

5. Fail over gracefully

Queue non-urgent jobs, serve cached results and surface a clear message to your users instead of a raw error. Streaming clients should reconnect rather than replay the whole request.

6. Confirm it is not your network

Egress firewall rules, expired TLS trust stores and proxy timeouts produce identical symptoms to an outage. Test from a second network before declaring an incident.