Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6 model threw errors across the board on April 8, 2026. The outage hit everything: claude.ai, the API, platform.claude.com, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Engineers started investigating at 06:23 UTC and had a fix rolling out by 07:59 UTC.
Hacker News users had thoughts. "More newsworthy when Claude works than when it doesn't," one quipped. The Twitter "fail whale" references showed up fast. Someone flagged rising token consumption on paid plans, wondering if efficiency problems were creeping in alongside the reliability ones.
The cross-platform blast radius points to a shared infrastructure failure, likely in the model serving stack or API gateway. The 96-minute window from detection to fix suggests it was addressable through configuration changes or rapid deployment rather than major infrastructure work. Anthropic hasn't published a post-mortem, so the exact technical cause remains unclear.