Anthropic logged a service incident on May 16, 2026 after multiple Claude models began returning elevated error rates. The issue affected several models simultaneously, which suggests the problem sits in shared infrastructure rather than one specific model version - when individual models have issues, they tend to fail independently.
The company's status page tracked updates in real time as the team investigated.
If you rely on Claude for production workloads - automated workflows, Claude Code sessions, anything hitting the Anthropic API - this is the type of incident worth having a fallback plan for. Routing around a degraded provider for a few hours is straightforward if you've set it up in advance; most text tasks have API-compatible alternatives. Check the Claude status page for the current state of the incident.