I've been writing software and running production infrastructure for over 20 years. I've been on call at 3am, written post-mortems, and had the kind of conversations with clients about downtime that you don't forget. The baseline expectation, baked into every product I've ever built or supported, is that reliability is non-negotiable. You don't ship something people depend on and then shrug when it falls over.
So it's strange to find myself in a world where the tools so many people depend on daily go down with a frequency that would have cost me client confidence ten years ago, and somehow nobody seems particularly bothered.
The Claude status page is showing another incident as I write this. It's not unusual. Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub Copilot, Gemini, these services have outages constantly. Not rarely. Not occasionally. Constantly. Multiple times a week, sometimes daily. The status pages are almost always showing something yellow or red.
And the response from the industry, and from us as users, has been a collective shrug.
I get why. The technology is genuinely impressive and the productivity gains are real. We've built workflows around these tools and quietly adjusted our expectations to match what vendors actually deliver rather than what we'd normally demand. We've done it so smoothly that most people haven't noticed the adjustment.
But think about what we've actually accepted. If any other piece of critical infrastructure in your stack had this track record, you would have replaced it. Your database going down twice a week is not a beta-era quirk, it's a fire. Your payment processor "partially degraded" on a Monday afternoon is a crisis.
AI services? That's just Tuesday.
The thing that concerns me most is not the outages themselves. It's the normalization. When you stop expecting reliability from a system you depend on, you've made a quiet decision about your own standards. That decision has a way of spreading.
Twenty years of engineering taught me that reliability is a culture, not a feature. Right now, as an industry, we're not building it in, we're hoping nobody notices.
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Side note did anyone else notice earlier today when Claude was down briefly for everyone or having issues, the government portion was still fully operational because I did. 👀