AI Provider Outages: An On Call Playbook
On the morning of August 5, 2026, a major AI provider went dark for roughly seven and a half hours, and thousands of engineering teams learned in real time what an AI provider outage actually costs them. Anthropic's Claude models returned elevated error rates and failed API requests starting around 3:00 AM Eastern, and applications that quietly route user traffic through a large language model suddenly had no model to route to. Chatbots stopped answering. Summarization pipelines stalled.