Last Wednesday afternoon, I stared at my screen and waited

Last Wednesday afternoon, I asked Claude to revise some contract clauses. It took four minutes to reply. I assumed it was the network, refreshed the page three times, and got nowhere. I only found out when I scrolled through Twitter that Anthropic was having a service outage.

What happened—and who got hit?

Anthropic’s official status page announced that several models, including Claude Sonnet and Haiku, were experiencing “performance degradation.” In plain English, messages took ages to get a response, or the responses were gibberish.

More than 100 people were discussing it on Hacker News. Plenty were venting: clients chasing deliverables while they couldn’t ship; customer-service bots running on Claude suddenly talking nonsense.

I got stuck there, too. My friend Xiaolin runs a Xiaohongshu consultancy. That afternoon, she was writing ten posts for a client when the AI suddenly got dumb and every title came back as filler. “That was the moment I realized my one-person company was built on a platform I couldn’t control,” she said.

What it costs to replicate this backup plan

Money: Start at ¥0—registering a backup account is free—and budget another ¥30–50 per month for a second AI tool.
Time: One to two hours to register the account and move over the prompts.
Technical barrier: As long as I can use a browser and copy and paste, I’m set. No code involved.
First step: Open chat.openai.com or gemini.google.com and register a backup account. Then save the five prompts I use most often—the instructions I send to AI on repeat—in a note.

My own rough workaround is to keep common prompts in Notion. If AI goes down, I manually switch to the backup account and paste them in. It isn’t elegant, but it works.

How I’d think about it at each stage

If I’m just starting and barely use AI: I don’t need to switch today, and I won’t let this incident scare me off. But I am keeping one rule: don’t put all my eggs in one basket, even if I have only one AI account.

If I have one or two steady clients: I’d spend a weekend setting up two backup accounts. I made this mistake before—I only got serious after something broke, then scrambled around. That day, I burned two hours of delivery time with a client.

If I’m scaling and starting to use AI for batch content production: This is a wake-up call: my business continuity depends on an AI platform staying online. I’d seriously consider spending ¥30–50 a month on a second provider as insurance. That’s cheaper than turning down even one client project.

No AI platform has ever been 100% stable. “Backup” isn’t a technical problem; it’s a business problem.