Anthropic's Claude went down twice in 24 hours after hitting the top of the Apple App Store, triggering a massive login surge. The AI model itself was fine — the authentication and routing layer buckled under unexpected load. Using this outage as a case study, three layered system design concepts are explained: rate limiting (throttling requests at the front door with quotas), autoscaling (dynamically adding capacity, but with inherent lag), and load shedding (intentionally dropping non-critical requests to protect core functionality). The post also covers the 'death spiral' of cascading retries during traffic spikes, threshold tuning between layers, and how companies building on top of Anthropic can use multi-vendor abstraction layers (like AWS Bedrock) to avoid vendor lock-in during outages.
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