Claude degradation on May 8, 2026 — 1 hour 50 minutes degradation resolved
Claude was degraded for 1 hour 50 minutes on May 8, 2026.
Incident facts
| Service | Claude |
|---|---|
| Started | May 8, 2026 at 22:40 UTC |
| Resolved | May 9, 2026 at 00:30 UTC |
| Total duration | 1 hour 50 minutes |
| Peak severity | Degraded performance |
| Detection | Official Anthropic status feed |
Timeline
- Outage detected
- Confirmed by re-check
- Service restored — all clear
What happened
On May 8, 2026, Claude users worldwide experienced a service degradation lasting 1 hour 50 minutes. The incident was first detected by Are The Bots Down's monitoring system at May 8, 2026 at 22:40 UTC and resolved at May 9, 2026 at 00:30 UTC. Anthropic's official status feed confirmed the issue throughout. 12 status observations were recorded across the lifetime of this incident.
What to do when Claude is down
Claude outages on claude.ai often clear in under 15 minutes; the Anthropic API typically stays healthy when the consumer chat is degraded. Cross-reference status.claude.com, but it usually trails real-world incidents by 20 to 40 minutes.
Most users find it faster to switch tools than to wait. The closest alternatives to Claude for the same workflows are ChatGPT or Gemini.