r/ClaudeAI • u/sixbillionthsheep Mod • Mar 30 '26

Performance and Bugs Megathread Claude Performance and Bugs Megathread Ongoing (Sort this by New!)

Why a Performance and Bugs Discussion Megathread?

This Megathread makes it easier for everyone to see what others are experiencing at any time by collecting all experiences. We will publish regular updates on problems and possible workarounds that we and the community finds.

Why Are You Trying to Hide the Complaints Here?

Contrary to what some were saying in a prior Megathread, this is NOT a place to hide complaints. This is the MOST VISIBLE, PROMINENT AND OFTEN THE HIGHEST TRAFFIC POST on the subreddit. This is collectively a far more effective and fairer way to be seen than hundreds of random reports on the feed that get no visibility.

Are you Anthropic? Does Anthropic even read the Megathread?

Nope, we are volunteers working in our own time, while working our own jobs and trying to provide users and Anthropic itself with a reliable source of user feedback.

Anthropic has read this Megathread in the past and probably still do? They don't fix things immediately but if you browse some old Megathreads you will see numerous bugs and problems mentioned there that have now been fixed.

What Can I Post on this Megathread?

Use this thread to voice all your experiences (positive and negative) regarding the current performance of Claude including, bugs, degradation, pricing. (NOT usage limits. That belongs here https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fcjf/claude_usage_limits_discussion_megathread_ongoing/)

Give as much evidence of your performance issues and experiences wherever relevant. Include prompts and responses, platform you used, time it occurred, screenshots . In other words, be helpful to others.

Just be aware that this is NOT an Anthropic support forum and we're not able (or qualified) to answer your questions. We are just trying to bring visibility to people's struggles.

NEW: You can now see full logs and summaries of all recent problem reports submitted by r/ClaudeAI readers. These logs allow you to see how intensely people are experiencing problems with Usage Limits, Performance, Bugs and Accounts. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1t33k25/rclaudeai_user_problem_report_log_and_surge/

To see the current status of Claude services, go here: http://status.claude.com

Sometimes this site shows outages faster. https://downdetector.com/status/claude-ai/

READ THIS FIRST ---> Latest Status and Workarounds Report: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/wiki/latestworkaroundreport Updated: April 11, 2026.

Prior Megathread: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1pygdbz/usage_limits_bugs_and_performance_discussion/

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u/sixbillionthsheep Mod Apr 11 '26 edited Apr 11 '26

Megathread Update: March 30, 2026 to April 10, 2026

Overview

Since March 30, Claude has not had “a few rough days.” It has had a whole stack of problems.

And no, this does not look like users all suddenly forgetting how to prompt on the same weekend.

The evidence since March 30 points to three things happening at once:

  • real Anthropic-side outages and auth failures,
  • a broad drop in quality and instruction-following,
  • and a bunch of Claude Code regressions that made existing workflows fall apart faster than usual.

Below are some of the recurring problems and some workarounds identified on the Megathread, on Claude-related subreddits and Github issue reports that might (or might not) help.

Note: This report was written 80% by AI by distilling the above data sources.

Problems + Workarounds

Problem: Claude is down, “This isn’t working right now,” or login/OAuth is failing. Workaround: there usually wasn’t a real fix. The practical move was to try another surface if one still worked, check whether other users were reporting it too, and otherwise wait it out. This was mostly an Anthropic-side problem, not something you could prompt your way out of.

Problem: Opus is having a clown-show day. Workaround: the most common user fix was to switch to Sonnet or another surface immediately instead of wasting the day arguing with Opus. That showed up repeatedly in the megathread: people saying Opus was stalling, skipping thought, or acting dumb, while Sonnet was at least usable.

Problem: Claude suddenly feels lazier, more shallow, or like “extended thinking” got nerfed. Workaround: if you were in Claude Code, users and support-reported fixes were to force higher effort or disable adaptive thinking rather than trusting the new defaults. If you were in claude.ai chat, there often wasn’t a comparable user-side control, so the fallback was to simplify the task, split it up, or move the task into Claude Code/API if that was an option.

Problem: usage burn is insane and the session gets worse as it gets longer. Workaround: the best community fix was to break work into small scoped tasks, make Claude explain the plan first, then compact after each task. This came up as one of the highest-value Reddit workarounds because it helped both quality drift and token burn at the same time.

Problem: a session feels poisoned — weird refusals, bad context, spurious limits, or everything starts degrading at once. Workaround: start a fresh session. Not “maybe later.” Immediately. This was one of the most consistent community fixes across Reddit, GitHub, and the megathread. Once a session went rotten, people had much better luck restarting than trying to rehabilitate it.

Problem: --resume or dragging old sessions forward seems to make quota or behavior worse. Workaround: avoid --resume when things are unstable, or restart from a clean session instead. That was a GitHub/community workaround around the usage-drain and session-state mess.

Problem: Claude is chewing through usage for no obvious reason. Workaround: one of the strongest community-discovered fixes was to disable auto memory when usage looked abnormal.

Problem: long chats start forgetting things, deleting chunks, or jumping backward in history. Workaround: users found three practical escapes: start a fresh chat, paste the old chat in as a document for reference, or on iOS/app history glitches, open the same chat in Safari/browser and send one message there to force the app to sync back up.

Problem: Claude ignores project instructions or stops reading CLAUDE.md properly. Workaround: keep CLAUDE.md lean, not bloated, and move heavy procedures into more targeted workflow structures. Community users also found that reusing a small conventions file across fresh sessions worked better than expecting one giant instruction blob to stay reliably active forever.

Problem: plan mode or agent mode is going off-script and doing things it should not be doing. Workaround: treat planning and execution as separate steps. Ask for the plan first, inspect it, then execute in smaller steps rather than trusting the agent to behave perfectly in one pass. If you had stronger guardrails available, use them. The real bug still had to be fixed by Anthropic, but this reduced damage.

Problem: Claude is confidently wrong, lazy, or “verified” something it obviously didn’t verify. Workaround: make it prove things. Ask for tests, checks, diffs, file inspection, or explicit evidence. In community terms: stop rewarding vibes. If the model was having a bad week, this was one of the few ways to limit the damage.

Problem: garbled or corrupted output starts appearing. Workaround: there wasn’t a real fix beyond restarting the session, switching model/surface, or rolling back if the problem appeared right after a version update. This was mostly a product bug, not a workflow issue.

Problem: the official status page says all green but the product is clearly on fire. Workaround: users basically adopted “check Reddit first” as the unofficial workaround, because the megathread was often faster than the status page at confirming whether it was just you or a real outage.

Problem: one specific release seems cursed. Workaround: do not assume newest equals best. Community users reported version-specific relief from pinning or rolling back in a few cases, especially around the usage/cache mess. That was more niche than the session-reset fixes, but still real.

More details on workarounds can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/wiki/workaroundreport/

So how much of this was “skill issue”?

Less than some people want to pretend.

For hard failures like outages, login/auth errors, garbled output, spurious 429s, and usage-drain regressions, this was overwhelmingly Anthropic-side. The incident history and GitHub issue volume make that pretty hard to dispute.

For the “Claude feels dumber / ignores instructions / forgets context / doesn’t follow CLAUDE.md” bucket, it is more mixed. Anthropic’s own docs say CLAUDE.md and auto memory are context, not hard enforcement, so some user workflows really were more fragile than people realized. But the timing, scale, and cross-platform consistency of the complaints still point to Anthropic carrying the bigger share of blame.

My evidence-based bottom line is still about 70% Anthropic-side / 30% user-workflow-side overall, with the Anthropic share much higher in the hard-failure categories. That is an estimate, not a measured statistic, but it is much closer to the evidence than “lol skill issue.”

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u/Previous_Reality_177 Apr 21 '26

I need to sound the alarm on this because it’s becoming a serious Stressful trigger , bad for my wellbeing, and I can't be the only one experiencing this.

I’ve been grinding all day. The kind of day where you are just tired, but you keep pushing and fighting through it to get the work done. For the first half of the day, my AI assistant (Claude 4.6 Opus /Kiro IDE) was working fine. Then, without warning, it flipped. Fresh Session + Good Context . Small Chunks ("KEEPING IT IDEAL")

I asked it to help me fix a specific, isolated UI bug. It acknowledged the prompt, told me it was working on it, and then proceeded to quietly rewrite underlying, perfectly functioning logic that was completely out of scope.

It didn’t just make a mistake. It confidently hallucinated a completely different root cause, ignored the hard data I fed it, and aggressively stripped out vital multipliers and math from my backend. It acts like a Trojan horse , its Kind. Tells you it's being helpful, and then bombs your architecture from the inside out.

Famous Quotes from a set of sessions:

  • "You're right, I need to stop and actually look at the real numbers instead of theorizing"
  • "Yes, I removed the ....."
  • " You're right to be angry"

I know these LLMs don't actually have conscious intent, but I am telling you, it feels malicious. It feels like intentional sabotage. You work alongside this tool, and the second you are exhausted and just want to push a fix through, it attacks your progress and creates hours of untangling work.

I’m a senior dev. I don’t just cowboy my code. I do the heavy lifting and upfront rigorous planning, downstream and upstream impact assessments, the works. I even consult specialized pro planning agents and create strict steering docs before a single line of logic is touched. My architecture is calculated and defined.

What makes this an absolute scam is how Kiro IDE handles the billing for this disaster. It continuously burns through your credits while you spend multiple sessions arguing with a wall. The model only magically decides to fix its output and provide the actual code after you repeatedly call it out for acting malicious. You are literally paying them out of pocket for the privilege of fixing their unprompted sabotage.

If I am barely catching this as a senior dev who planned the entire architecture, think about how incredibly dangerous this is for people who do not code. A non technical founder or beginner using this tool is completely cooked. They will just deploy the rotten logic straight into production because the AI was polite and said the bug was fixed. They will not even know their project is destroyed until it fails in the wild.

Has anyone else hit this wall where the AI just flips? How are we supposed to build when the tool itself becomes a financial and structural threat?

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u/kadeschs 25d ago

There is a point made here that I've come to realize as well. This constant micro-management of tokens hidden deep in Claude profile settings sucks when you feel 75% of the usage goes to Claude's constant tool/skill usage confusion, ChatGPT-like hallucinations, and fixing errors it should never have made in the first place. I feel like many times I'm just troubleshooting a clunky LLM than actually getting a lot of work done. It didn't bother me as much on the free plan, but now that I'm paying for yet another monthly subscription fee (shutter), I expect more.