Depending on what your job is, this is either the adult equivalent of a snow day or some of the greatest stress in a long time.
I have experienced, half a decade ago during some more frequent but less lengthy O365 errors that there are some higher ups who get when this is not something you can fix and some you very much can't. Wishing strength to any "but it's our mail" and "but we bought the Claude" meetings that happen today.
No, and that's also not necessary. We are reliant on our systems. The correct response is to harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.
We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
What's wrong with failover? I don't use anything from Anthropic except their API. So when Claude is having issues, I switch to GLM 5.3 or something, doesn't take more than a few seconds.
I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.
You’re not wrong, but some companies swing real hard at the biggest players assuming they won’t all be down at the same time. My work has hard dependencies on 365 and Cloud Entra and only allows Claude company wide. Today is going to be a snow day since we couldn’t get into anything yesterday but we could at least get projects done using connections Claude had into various platforms that cached the data in 365.
>harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.
Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.
Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.
>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.
There is always something that you can do that isn’t gated by the api. It isn’t critical path for literally everything. Go organize your expense reports or something.
I agree that it's an opportunity to "do it the old way", as a way to preserve the skill. I actually would like to do that regularly, like half a day every week or something.
But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...
Seriously, if the LLM was down and a dev submitted 10 PRs, I think it would raise some good/bad curiosity from the team with where things stands today.
Is there not a single SaaS, cloud company or similar that your org depends on? No AWS, no Cloudflare, all internal mail servers, no Docusign, no outside inference, nothing of that sort?
I get what you're saying and I would wholeheartedly agree 5-7 years ago but after hearing Our Lord and Savior Claude Code as the solution to all our technical problems with ever increasing fervor and intensity for the last two years, I'm gonna take the cynical route, maybe fence on office chairs, not because my code is compiling, nor my prompt is running, but Claude is down management, what do you want me to do now, actually think?
From what I hear, the project managers are having a hard time sending emails anyway. We'll call it quits, winkwink.
I can't imagine a construction worker saying, power is out, gotta find a way to be productive, I guess instead of the paint sprayer, nail gun and circular saw, we'll just find other ways to be productive with our hands. The same might apply to law, medicine, etc. I think we're almost there with software.
I understand what you’re trying yo day, but my family ran a construction company for generations (until my father retired) and they had contingencies for every adverse scenario to stay on schedule: Generators, battery-operated tools, hand-operated tools, heaters for pretty much anything you can think of for extreme cold, wind coverings, etc. I don’t remember them ever stopping work except for a trade union strike.
I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.
Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.
Those things are also still pretty loud. And if you have a large shared office space, it might take hours for it to finish.
At our office we have a cleaning crew and when they come by to vacuum during office hours, everyone in our section takes a 5 minute coffee break and then it's done when we get back.
There's also the option where it doesn't affect you at all, because you do not rely on LLMs—or even just do not rely specifically on Claude—at all, and can easily do your job without ever noticing that it's down.
I suppose I can't bring myself to do the drudgery of coding. I enjoy some of the problem solving but not the workflow frictions, spending 20 minutes due to a stupid typos, syntax fuckery, API lookups, etc.
I've started noticing at $WORK that a lot of systems, procedures, etc. that fall under SDLC or devX are being made ever more onerous or complex because "LLMs can do it."
Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.
The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!
Yep. This is what happens. Once you give up control it's mostly gone. The interesting thing is, if you maintain control, you can always choose to use llms here and there. But expecting humans to dive into 10000 file 40million line code bases branded todo apps isn't going to happen.
Really makes me wonder how much some programmers really understood programming 5 years ago if this is the reaction to a very recent knowledge center being down.
I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.
You doing your work manually is like going back to the 90s or further even. It feels like dropping into 6502 manual assembly mode. It's fun but it's not "work" anymore. I honestly think without AI my company is better off if we programmers sat around and talked like humans about business. Coding is for the clankers now.
No not really. Most the companies I know that haven't gone full vibes are doing great.
People can and do still write code. Especially in regulated industries. The internet is just full con artists and hype followers not thinking about the future at all.
If all the professionals leave coding to clankers, and discussions about coding to people who code, I see nothing I don't love about that. Just like the web was more interesting before there was money in it, coding is more interesting without people who can't shut up about their work.
Just as you described. Snowday for some...
I was caught in between snowday and stress today with these things.
Got too used for claude to just do most things.
But at the same time was surprised I could still google and resolve things myself when I started thinking again lmao.
I think it should be fine for most people. Hopefully people don't rely on Claude for Ops, and if it's not Ops-related but just regular coding, I can't see why it shouldn't be able to wait a few days. I mean, even if Claude is down for a month, people should have enough competent developers to keep going, just at a slightly slower pace, right?
I really don’t feel comfortable merging a PR not reviewed by both of our AI reviewers. They catch so many bugs no human could. Seriously changed my view of code since we started using it in earnest. Bugs shall not pass. Without AI it feels like the Wild West again.
Ditto. I can do it, and thankfully I’ll say AI mostly catches weird edge cases that often aren’t worth the trouble, but having a 2nd set of eyes has been great for quality.
This mindset of "I don't trust myself to do it" is a bit (sorry) pathetic. I think one should realize that mistakes happen and to a certain extent, though professionals have lower rates of failure, everything is a tradeoff.
Some people have asked me, aren't you afraid you'll make a mistake if you fix your own car? Well, aren't they afraid their mechanic will make a mistake?
I think it's good to realize that AI (famously) also makes mistakes, and not to infantilize yourself to the level of not feeling "comfortable" trusting your own thinking.
Though, I do see younger people today whipping out their phone calculator to "double check" something like a 75% increase on 120.
Apologize for strong words, and sorry, nothing personal, but I find this mindset bizarre and even comical. Will we reach a stage where surgeons on the operating table will second-guess their experience and education and refer to an AI assistant?
Imagine we had an AI system that could monitor 38 different patient signals (from blood pressure electrical activity in the brain) during a surgery and give the surgeon warnings whenever these drifted out of the expected range. It feels plausible to me that using such a system might improve surgery outcomes by, say, 20%.
I would prefer to have a surgeon who used the AI assistant rather than a surgeon who chose not to.
Potentially. Probably not in my lifetime, but it's not impossible given how most sci-fi works depict it. You can argue we had a bit of that paradigm shift already with specialized machinery. I'm sure people can still do hand surgeries, but existing tools and sensors increase the precision.
it is a bit sad comparing that to "I can't check for bugs without an AI", though.
Yes, definitely. If an android nails your procedure while you doing it manually drops it into the low, say, 60s survival rate, what would you expect? I fully expect all human workers becoming dependent very quickly once the clankers get good enough.
Unlike what many programmers like to think, programming is not a skilled work on the level of surgery. And besides, many doctors probably would benefit their patients by having AI assist in their work. This has already been experimentally shown for e.g. medical imaging diagnosis.
Was viewing it more through the lens of less technical companies, Excel, Powerpoint, the backbone of traditional office work has become very model dependent in some companies I have seen and those are the owners and fellow employees that tend to struggle more in getting that the local IT guy can't fix this themselves vs developers.
The most likely scenario, is their team of high achievers, deployed a massive pile of stinking technical debt, against the advice of the experienced folks who are constantly overridden.
On a normal environment the old Graybeards would fix it, after grumping on being taken away from playing with their latest Emacs config.
But this is the Valley, and we dont do experience only VibeOps. And half reading this post, are wondering if Emacs is a new frontend framework they never heard about....
I have fond memories of the “we’re a tech company, why can’t we get a video conferencing call going” and gently reminding them that reliable, synchronous, multiparty video conferencing was a lot harder than anything this company was trying to do.
The odd thing about these outages is that when they become so big that everyone is impacted then the severity almost drops, since everyone is impacted and thus just shrugs their shoulders.
Yup, it seems like there are a lot of options, but in reality lots of things have become severly centralized. (There has never been a better time to self-host by the way. My Forgejo instance for example is having practically no outages. For AI, use the open models via one of the competing providers.)
Copilot is down too, so it's probably Microsoft engineers trying to vibecode their replacement Azure infrastructure before the current garbage fire finishes burning out.
I absolutely hate it, can't understand how that's all they offer (or Google SSO). It's bad enough when the password option is just really hidden and non-obvious (like Notion iirc), not having it at all is ridiculous.
I don't have that email account on my phone. So to log in, I have to open my laptop, get the 'magic' link, find a way to send it to myself on my phone that doesn't make a request (e.g. for an unfurl) expiring it, and then open it on my phone to log in. So magic.
If you open login form and link on different devices, you'll get code to type, no need to send link.
So basically you start login on phone, keep page open. Open laptop, click on link on laptop and you'll get a code. You type that code on your phone and that's all.
There are a number of clipboard sync apps, but personally I swear by simply having an E2E encrypted chat app on both your desktop and phone that lets you send messages to yourself. Serves both the clipboard usecase and as a general "notes to self" space.
I requested Mythos access and was granted it. But now apparently I need to use Google Sign In on my account instead of email link, as email link is not secure enough. But my email is not google, it's my custom domain. Now I don't even know what to do. I don't want to buy google apps or whatever it's called just to be able to use Google SSO with my custom domain; and I don't want to register completely new account for gmail either. It's a mess.
Usually it is the weakest link in the chain, and you are encouraged to switch to proper 2FA or Passkey instead. So even if the email is compromised, other accounts are not compromised.
Is there indication this is really a separate issue or just Claude not being able to reach Microsoft Entra for whatever periodic requests confirm the user is authenticated (and maybe this page even simply being automatic reflection that those requests are errorring frequently)?
Are people who don't use M365 experiencing issues here?
I used claude for the first time in months yesterday (have been using codex, ran out of resets this week). I had picked up from general consensus comments that 5.5 had fixed the opus 5 issues, but that's far from the case. Its "personality" is still smartass, know it all, and whiny. It disregards specifications in tickets if it thinks it knows better. It complains about the size of tasks when it reads task descriptions. I've gotten used to codex, which just jumps in and does stuff (which of course carries its own set of issues). I have no love for Altman, but their product is still better at the moment.
The post was about their uptime. How is this relevant.
Even if it vaguely is, why do people think subjective anecdotal thoughts about which model is better are a good discussion topic. If there’s an objective evaluation idea that would be useful.
I run evals for a very specific domain. Opus 5.5 is still the industry leader (we can’t use Fable class yet).
It's relevant because there's only so many "yep it's down" comments that are interesting. They have a technology problem which isn't fixed. They're about to go IPO. Their marketing is clearly still working, but subjective experience with both contradicts the marketing.
It’s alarming how much of the project knowledge ends up in agentic workflows… although that information is technically on your computer, how long will it take you to find it and unravel the string?
Time to warm up the GPUs I guess, since I can’t be fucked to do it myself lol. Thank gods for qwen flash next and DeepSeek!
TBH the only reason I’m not working mainly with flash next anyway is that I can only run inference for one agent at a time on my setup.
This stuff is so new and wild west at the moment that in our company everyone is using it completely differently. 20% of the devs have 30x output and are doing everything with Claude, 10% won't touch it, the rest are in some weird in between where they use it for some things and not other things which it is perfect for. We have managers that suggest just going back to doing it by hand when there are outages, which is the most laughable thing in the world to me now. It is incredible to watch this miracle tech hit so fast and have everyone's understanding of it be so different across the board.
I suspect he already used up all the plan B in his immediate vicinity. I feel for the dude, he clearly let shit go to his head. I knew things weren’t going well for him when he put on the leather jacket. It’s basically putting on the “bad boy” costume. If you haven’t purified your soul before donning the jacket, it will consume you, like the one ring.
Lmfao I know this should not bring me joy, but it does. Is this the great filter? AI builds AI. Society becomes completely dependent on AI. It goes down, no one can fix it. Total chaos ensues.
It really is Friday the 13th today with outlook and now Claude both being mostly down. I wonder if this is related though. Either way not going to be a great ad for their IPO.
I hope it stays down for the day so my hack "colleagues" flail like imbeciles for the lulz. And I won't have to review their "work" because literally all they do is prompt dear CLAUDE and have everyone read their slop.
another day, another anthropic outage. Yes, this is because of Microsoft, but they do seem to have a significantly higher amount service disruptions compared to the other LLM providers.
I have experienced, half a decade ago during some more frequent but less lengthy O365 errors that there are some higher ups who get when this is not something you can fix and some you very much can't. Wishing strength to any "but it's our mail" and "but we bought the Claude" meetings that happen today.
We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.
Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.
Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.
>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s
The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.
But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...
From what I hear, the project managers are having a hard time sending emails anyway. We'll call it quits, winkwink.
I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.
Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.
Or maybe more prescient; machine operators going home on a cold day because they can’t get their loader started.
At our office we have a cleaning crew and when they come by to vacuum during office hours, everyone in our section takes a 5 minute coffee break and then it's done when we get back.
That's a scary thought.
Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.
The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!
Tractor breaks, you complain about shoveling again and someone says you’re in the wrong job.
I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.
People can and do still write code. Especially in regulated industries. The internet is just full con artists and hype followers not thinking about the future at all.
I’ve been in this situation before, an external API is basically down and my managers solution is to blame me.
Didn’t last there too long.
But at the same time was surprised I could still google and resolve things myself when I started thinking again lmao.
Why are you still employed? What do you bring to the table if you’ve off loaded so much to AI that you can no longer review a pull request…?
Some people have asked me, aren't you afraid you'll make a mistake if you fix your own car? Well, aren't they afraid their mechanic will make a mistake?
I think it's good to realize that AI (famously) also makes mistakes, and not to infantilize yourself to the level of not feeling "comfortable" trusting your own thinking.
Though, I do see younger people today whipping out their phone calculator to "double check" something like a 75% increase on 120.
Imagine we had an AI system that could monitor 38 different patient signals (from blood pressure electrical activity in the brain) during a surgery and give the surgeon warnings whenever these drifted out of the expected range. It feels plausible to me that using such a system might improve surgery outcomes by, say, 20%.
I would prefer to have a surgeon who used the AI assistant rather than a surgeon who chose not to.
Amusingly, I did the same and it told me there's no point in taking more than a single dose in my uncomplicated case (prophylactically).
it is a bit sad comparing that to "I can't check for bugs without an AI", though.
On a normal environment the old Graybeards would fix it, after grumping on being taken away from playing with their latest Emacs config.
But this is the Valley, and we dont do experience only VibeOps. And half reading this post, are wondering if Emacs is a new frontend framework they never heard about....
My soul just dry-heaved from laughter. Nice.
O364...
yeah, couldn't be me
OAuth request failed Temporarily unable to authenticate. Please retry.
Can this be fall-out from the Microsoft outage?
94 points by cloudbreaker 22 hours from now | flag | hide | 64 comments
Copilot is down too, so it's probably Microsoft engineers trying to vibecode their replacement Azure infrastructure before the current garbage fire finishes burning out.
I don't have that email account on my phone. So to log in, I have to open my laptop, get the 'magic' link, find a way to send it to myself on my phone that doesn't make a request (e.g. for an unfurl) expiring it, and then open it on my phone to log in. So magic.
So basically you start login on phone, keep page open. Open laptop, click on link on laptop and you'll get a code. You type that code on your phone and that's all.
They just outsource the security into your email provider.
Are people who don't use M365 experiencing issues here?
It seems resolved now.
Even if it vaguely is, why do people think subjective anecdotal thoughts about which model is better are a good discussion topic. If there’s an objective evaluation idea that would be useful.
I run evals for a very specific domain. Opus 5.5 is still the industry leader (we can’t use Fable class yet).
It's relevant because there's only so many "yep it's down" comments that are interesting. They have a technology problem which isn't fixed. They're about to go IPO. Their marketing is clearly still working, but subjective experience with both contradicts the marketing.
> I run evals for a very specific domain.
What do your evals test for?
I guess anecdotal but people nowadays are incredibly addicted to LLMs, to the point where they cant or dont want to work when there's an outage
Time to warm up the GPUs I guess, since I can’t be fucked to do it myself lol. Thank gods for qwen flash next and DeepSeek!
TBH the only reason I’m not working mainly with flash next anyway is that I can only run inference for one agent at a time on my setup.
3 minutes later... I can reconnect, and the "crashed" instance woke up.
currently running a Claude model through github copilot CLI. Pretty odd given the two ongoing outages.
https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365/
Office 364.3789278392647
(estimated)
Well, it was my employers wish that we devs incorporate more AI, and we did. It's their misfortune now.
well, it works on my machine.
try this one /s
Jim Cramer has $MSFT as "DON'T BUY"
6 Hours later after this comment [0] Claude also went down. It's now up to the human engineers (if there are any) to fix this outage.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50478409