Claude Code is locking people out for hours

TL;DR Highlight

Claude Code is experiencing repeated service stability issues such as OAuth timeouts, query slowdowns, and malfunctioning background agents. Concerns are growing that this is not simply a bug, but a structural problem related to Anthropic's compute capacity limits.

Who Should Read

Developers actively using Claude Code (including Max subscriptions) in their workflows, who are experiencing significant productivity impacts due to service stability issues or are considering alternatives.

Core Mechanics

When logging into Claude Code in a Windows + WSL environment, a bug repeatedly occurs where the 'OAuth error: timeout of 15000ms exceeded' error appears, making the app unusable. This is as of version 2.1.92, and the Google account login flow is not completed.
This login failure coincides with a large-scale service outage that occurred on April 6, 2026, and is not an isolated bug. Most Claude Code users were unable to log in. The status of the outage could be checked at status.claude.com.
Multiple reports indicate that Claude Max subscribers are exceeding their limits after just one query. Community analysis suggests that Max users are grouped into a shared compute pool, and the surge in demand following issues with OpenAI has exceeded the pool's upper limit.
There are reports that query response speeds have slowed down by approximately 3x compared to before. Both Sonnet and Opus are reportedly slow in the Claude Code on Max environment.
There are complaints that the background agent functionality is essentially broken. When a task is assigned to the Sonnet background agent, it fails due to permission errors, and the expensive Opus model intercepts and processes the task in the foreground. This impacts both context management and token costs.
One community comment interpreted this phenomenon as 'distillation' (a technique for transferring the capabilities of a large model to a smaller model). It suggests that Anthropic is degrading quality by replacing Claude Code with a lightweight model to reduce compute pool load, and subjective experiences of increasingly frequent unnecessary interruptions like 'Continue?' or 'Run this command to see this information' have increased in recent times after being absent for over a year.
A practical tip shared is that if a locked state has not yet occurred, pre-preparing a token with the 'claude setup-token' command allows bypassing login issues by using 'CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN=sk... claude' in the future.

Evidence

"After this issue became a hot topic on Hacker News, a comment pointed out that the original title '[BUG] Claude Code login fails with OAuth timeout on Windows' was much more specific, but an HN editor changed it to 'locking people out for hours,' which was criticized as an exaggeration. Other comments countered that the exaggeration was not justified considering the issue arose during a large-scale outage."

How to Apply

If you can still log into Claude Code, run the 'claude setup-token' command now to save the OAuth token in advance. This will allow you to bypass access issues by using 'CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN=sk... claude' in the future if a login failure occurs.
If you are operating Claude Code on Max on a team basis, include status.claude.com in your monitoring pipeline and prepare a fallback flow to directly call the Anthropic API when an outage occurs to minimize service disruption.
If background agents are failing and Opus is performing the task in the foreground, wasting context and tokens, recognize that agent permission processing is currently unstable and explicitly specify the model and execution method for important long-term tasks, or manually separate and execute tasks for safety.
If you are using Claude Code in business-critical workflows, it is recommended to use a stable release channel or pin a specific version instead of automatically updating to the latest version of Anthropic, and to develop a habit of monitoring for performance degradation due to external factors such as compute capacity issues.

Code Example

snippet

# 1. Generate token when login is possible
claude setup-token

# 2. Bypass execution with token when login failure occurs
CLAUDE_CODE_OAUTH_TOKEN=sk-ant-xxxxx claude

Terminology

OAuthA standard authentication method that allows apps to log in through external services like Google/GitHub without directly receiving the user's password. The flow involves passing a token to the app from the browser, and the timeout occurred during this process.

컴퓨트 풀The total amount of GPU/server resources shared by multiple users. If a pool is full, there is no room to process new requests, resulting in slow responses or limit exceeded errors.

distillationKnowledge distillation. A technique for training a smaller model with data generated by a large, high-performing model (such as Claude Opus) to achieve similar quality with less compute. It is used to reduce compute load, but can lead to quality degradation.

WSLWindows Subsystem for Linux. A feature that allows you to run a Linux environment on Windows without virtualization. Conflicts can occur in OAuth redirection processing when Windows native and WSL environments coexist.

stable release channelA deployment channel that receives software updates only after they have been thoroughly tested, rather than immediately. Used when prioritizing stability over the latest features.

포어그라운드 에이전트An agent that executes tasks directly in the current session that the user is interacting with. It can quickly consume the context window and use expensive models, so it is more efficient to delegate simple tasks to a separate background agent.