Claude Code usage spiked 8x during Anthropic outage — retries burn paid limits, no compensation
PreEchoDev · reddit · 2026-10-28
A Claude Pro subscriber found their 5-hour allowance vanishing on Oct 27 — about 10% gone in 3 minutes. Local ccusage logs showed:
- Total tokens: 161M daily average → 1.306B (8.1x)
- Output tokens: 303K → 7.97M (26.3x)
- Estimated API-equivalent cost: $41.17 → $493.04 (12x)
Anthropic support confirmed:
- Two incidents of elevated errors for Claude Sonnet 5.5 occurred Oct 27, and errors trigger retries that burn usage faster
- Failed requests and retries triggered by service errors count toward subscription usage limits
- Such usage cannot be refunded, credited, or compensated — final answer
- The user's Pro subscription was affected
The author admits the 8x spike can't be fully attributed to the incidents, but Anthropic explicitly confirmed retries count against paid limits while refusing compensation. The complaint has been escalated to human support.
More from coding & agent
- VibeVideoBench: multimodal agents coding videos often fail on time management — Muxi Diao · 2026-10-28
- Dev builds open-source Excalidraw MCP after AI-generated diagrams kept overlapping text and arrows — pikahikmag · 2026-10-28
- DeepSeek vs Haiku pricing debunk: accounting for peak rates and token use, 1017 is 2-2.5x cheaper — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-28
- Viral screenshot shows an agent spawning 32 parallel workspaces in ~30 seconds — cephaloform · 2026-10-28
- Grok Bot 0.78.1 hides unreleased per-bot logins with manager-only team sharing — faraz0x · 2026-10-28
- Uber Built a Legal Redlining Agent for Its Lawyers—Here's What It Learned — AxSaucedo · 2026-10-28