Anthropic Incident Runbook

Overview

Respond to Anthropic API incidents in production — outages, sustained 529 errors, authentication failures, and timeouts. Covers status page checking, severity classification, model fallback activation, communication, and post-incident review.

Step 1: Confirm the Issue

# Check Anthropic status
curl -s https://status.anthropic.com/api/v2/status.json | python3 -c "
import json, sys
d = json.load(sys.stdin)
print(f\"Status: {d['status']['description']} ({d['status']['indicator']})\")"

# Test API directly
curl -s -w "\nHTTP %{http_code} in %{time_total}s\n" \
  https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages \
  -H "x-api-key: $ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" \
  -H "claude-version: 2023-06-01" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"claude-haiku-4-5-20251001","max_tokens":5,"messages":[{"role":"user","content":"ping"}]}'

Step 2: Classify Severity

Symptom	Severity	Action
529 overloaded (intermittent)	Low	SDK auto-retries handle this
529 overloaded (sustained 5+ min)	Medium	Switch to fallback model
401/403 on all requests	High	API key issue — check console
All requests timing out	High	Check status page, activate fallback
Status page shows incident	Varies	Follow status page updates

Step 3: Activate Fallback

async function callWithFallback(params: Anthropic.MessageCreateParams) {
  try {
    return await client.messages.create(params);
  } catch (err) {
    if (err instanceof Anthropic.APIError && (err.status === 529 || err.status === 500)) {
      // Try a different model
      if (params.model.includes('opus')) {
        return await client.messages.create({ ...params, model: 'claude-sonnet-4-20250514' });
      }
      if (params.model.includes('sonnet')) {
        return await client.messages.create({ ...params, model: 'claude-haiku-4-5-20251001' });
      }
    }
    throw err;
  }
}

Step 4: Communicate

Update your status page if user-facing
Note: Anthropic incidents typically resolve in 15-60 minutes

Step 5: Post-Incident

Check your error logs for the incident window
Calculate impact (failed requests, user impact)
Verify all systems recovered

Output

Incident confirmed via status page and direct API test
Severity classified (Low/Medium/High) based on symptoms
Fallback activated if needed (downgrade model or queue requests)
Impact assessed and documented post-incident

Error Handling

Error	Cause	Solution
API Error	Check error type and status code	See `clade-common-errors`

Examples

See Step 1 (curl status check and API test), Step 2 (severity classification table), Step 3 (fallback code with model downgrade), and Step 5 (post-incident checklist) above.

Resources

Next Steps

See clade-reliability-patterns for building resilient integrations.

Prerequisites

Production Claude integration deployed
Fallback model configuration in place (see clade-reliability-patterns)
Monitoring/alerting configured (see clade-observability)

Instructions

Step 1: Review the patterns below

Each section contains production-ready code examples. Copy and adapt them to your use case.

Step 2: Apply to your codebase

Integrate the patterns that match your requirements. Test each change individually.

Step 3: Verify

Run your test suite to confirm the integration works correctly.

clade-incident-runbook