Brief Claude AI Outage Led To "90% Productivity Drop In Silicon Valley", Claims Startup Founder

A brief technical outage of Anthropic's Claude AI platform earlier this week triggered an outpouring of reactions across the tech community, with one startup founder claiming that productivity across Silicon Valley plummeted as developers and engineers struggled without their AI assistant. The outage occurred on February 24, when thousands of users encountered errors and service interruptions while using Claude's chat and developer tools. According to outage monitoring sites, more than 4,700 reports were logged at the peak of the disruption, with many encountering HTTP 500 internal server errors and communication issues with Anthropic's platform. 

Yuchen Jin, a startup founder, took to X during the incident to joke that productivity across the tech ecosystem had fallen by 90% in Claude's absence. He also admitted that he hadn't written a single line of code in the past two months, highlighting the tech sector's increasing dependence on artificial intelligence.

"Claude is down. Productivity across Silicon Valley drops 90%. I just realized I haven't typed a single line of code in 2 months," he wrote on X. 

See the post here:

Claude is down.

Productivity across Silicon Valley drops 90%.

I just realized I haven't typed a single line of code in 2 months...

— Yuchen Jin (@Yuchenj_UW) February 25, 2026

AI Dependence

Similar sentiments emerged across social media and developer forums. Many described the outage as a moment of forced self-reflection, with some saying that Claude had become like "electricity" for their work, and without it, they simply couldn't proceed. Others reported delays in writing code or completing tasks, highlighting how AI assistance has shifted from “optional tool” to essential component in modern software development and creative workflows.

Notably, tools like Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and others have become central to everyday work for millions of techies. 

One user wrote, "Looks like we've all been outsourcing our thinking to a very polite AI. My two brain cells are on strike now too." 

Another commented, "Haven't written a single line of code in the last few months, yet I'm still building a project that exceeds 6000+ lines of code during that time. Interesting times while I feel I'm forgetting how to code, I'm learning how to plan and design better: architecting the infra and pipelines more effectively while thinking less about the code itself.."

A third said, "Anyone saying Silicon Valley is 90% less productive because Claude might be flakey today is living in a world where tools run humans, not the other way around. AI outages happen. Adapt."