Claude goes dark again as Anthropic battles reliability issues

Anthropic's Claude.ai crashed for 78 minutes yesterday, hitting users with 403 authentication errors and API failures during peak usage. The status page logged elevated errors across Claude Sonnet 4.5 and MCP apps, with Hacker News threads drawing 70+ upvotes from frustrated users. This follows repeated outages as Claude scales to meet enterprise demand, undermining its positioning against OpenAI's more stable infrastructure. The timing is brutal: businesses integrating Claude for coding and automation workflows are questioning reliability just as Anthropic seeks to defend market share. Each downtime episode hands ammunition to competitors in an increasingly crowded AI assistant market.