Anthropic's Claude went offline on April 30, 2026 - both the consumer web product at Claude.ai and the developer API were affected at the same time. The company's status page logged the incident.
That double outage matters more than a single-surface failure. People using Claude.ai directly lost access to their writing and research workflows. Developers with apps that call the API in the background lost those too - meaning their users got errors without any clear explanation. One incident, two separate groups hit.
Root cause and total downtime weren't published at time of writing. Anthropic typically posts a resolution update and brief post-mortem to their status page once the team confirms a fix. If you rely on Claude professionally and don't already have status.claude.com bookmarked, now's the time.
For backup during outages, ChatGPT covers most text-based tasks and has a comparable API. Building a fallback into any AI-dependent workflow isn't over-engineering - provider outages are infrequent but not rare, and knowing which tasks can pause versus which need an alternative is worth deciding in advance rather than in the middle of a deadline.