A major internet outage beginning around 11:20 UTC today (Nov 18) has caused widespread service disruptions across the globe. The issue has been traced to Cloudflare, a critical web infrastructure provider used by a vast majority of modern web services.

While the outage has taken down major AI platforms like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), and Perplexity, users have noted that Google Gemini remains fully operational.

We've hit a tipping point with a precipitous drop off in quality in Claude Code and zero comms that has us about to abandon Anthropic.

We're currently working on (for ourselves and clients) a total of 5 platforms spanning fintech, gaming, media and entertainment and crypto verticals and are being built out by people with significant experience / track records of success. All of these were being built faster with Claude Code and would have pivoted to the more expensive API model for production launches in September/October 2025.

From a customer perspective, we've not opted into a "preview" or beta product. We've not opted into a preview ring for a service. We're paying for the maximum priced subscription you offer. We've been using Claude Code enthusiastically for weeks (and enthusiastically recommending it to others).

None of these projects are being built by newbie developers "vibe coding". This is being done by people with decades of experience, breaking down work into milestones and well documented granular tasks. These are well documented traditionally as well as with claude specific content (claude-config and multiple claude files, one per area). These are all experienced folks and we were seeing the promised nirvana of getting 10x in velocity from people who are 10x'ers, and it was magic.

Claude had been able to execute on our tasks masterfully... until recently, Yes, we had to hold our noses and suffer through the service outages, api timeouts, lying about tasks in the console and in commitments, disconnecting working code from *existing* services and data with mocks, and now its creating multiple versions of the same files (simple, prod, real, main) and confused about which ones to use post compaction. It's now creating variants of the same type of variants (.prod and .production). The value exchange is now out of balance enough that it's hit a tipping point. The product we loved is now one we cant trust in its execution, resulting product or communications.

Customers expect things to go wrong, but its how you handle them that determines whether you keep them or not. On that front, communication from Anthropic has been exceptionally poor. This is not just a poor end customer experience, the blast radius is extending to my customers and reputational impact to me for recommending you. The lack of trust you're engendering is going to be long-lasting.

You've turned one of the purest cases of delight I've experienced in decades of commercial software product delivery, to one of total disillusionment. You're executing so well on so many fronts, but dropping the ball on the one that likely matters most - trust.

In terms of blast radius, you're not just losing some faceless vibe coders $200 month or API revenue from real platforms powered by Anthropic, but experienced people who are well known in their respective verticals and were unpaid evangelists for your platform. People who will be launching platforms and doing press in the very near term, People who will be asking about the AI powering the platform and invariably asked about Anthropic vs. OpenAI vs. Google.

At present, for Anthropic the answer is "They had a great platform, then it caused us more problems than benefit, communication from Anthropic was non-existent, and good luck actually being able to speak to a person. We were so optimistic and excited about using it but it got to the point where what we loved had disappeared, Anthropic provided no insight, and we couldn't bet our business on it. They were so thoughtful in their communications about the promise and considerations of AI, but they dropped the ball when it came to operatioanl comms. It was a real shame." As you can imagine, whatever LLM service we do pivot to is going to put us on stage to promote that message of "you can't trust Anthropic to build a business on, the people who tried chose <Open AI, Google, ..>"

This post is one of two last ditch efforts to get some sort of insight form Anthropic before abandoning the platform (the other is to some senior execs at Amazon, as I believe they are an investor, to see if there's any way to backchannel or glean some insight into the situation)

I hope you take this post in the spirit it is intended. You had an absolutely wonderful product (I went from free to maximum priced offer literally within 20 minutes) and it really feels like it's been lobotomized as you try to handle the scale. I've run commercial services at one of the large cloud providers and multiple vertical/category leaders and I also used to teach scale/resiliency architecture. While I have empathy with the challenges you face with the significant spikes in interest, myself and my clients have businesses to run. Anthropic is clearly the leader *today* in coding LLMs, but you must know that OpenAI and others will have model updates soon - even if they're not as good, when we factor in remediation time.

I need to make a call on this today as I need to make any shifts in strategy and testing before August 1. We loved what we saw last month, but in lieu of any additional insights on what we're seeing, we're leaving the platform.

I'm truly hoping you'll provide some level of response as we'd honestly like to remain customers, but these quality issues are killing us and the poor comms have all but eroded trust. We're at a point that the combo feels like we can't remain customers without jeopardizing our business. We'd love any information you can share that could get us to stay.

-- update --

it looks like this post resonated with the experience others were seeing and the high engagement from. You also brought out a bunch of trolls. I got the info I needed re Anthropic (intended audience) and after trying to respond to everyone engaged, the trolls outweigh the folks still posting so will be disengaging on this post to get back to shipping software