Anthropic logged an elevated error rate on the Claude API (the service developers and businesses use to connect their apps to Claude) starting at 4:16 AM UTC on May 22, 2026. The incident was tracked on Anthropic's public status page.
"Elevated error rate" is different from a full outage - some API calls succeed while others fail. That can actually be harder to handle than a clean outage, because apps may produce partial results or behave unpredictably depending on which calls hit the error condition. Anthropic hasn't published details on the root cause.
Claude's track record on uptime is generally solid, but incidents like this expose a real dependency risk for teams running time-sensitive workflows through a single AI provider. A content pipeline, a customer support integration, an automated research tool - any of these pauses or behaves unpredictably when the underlying API develops errors. The practical mitigation is either a secondary provider that can absorb traffic during outages or a retry queue that holds jobs and reprocesses them once service recovers. Neither is complicated to implement, but both require setting up before you need them.
Anthropic publishes live status at status.claude.com. If Claude API availability is critical to your workflow, that page is worth bookmarking.