Claude Opus 4.6 Elevated Error Incident — March 17, 2026 Outage Triggers 106-Comment Thread

r/ClaudeAI·medium signal

An official Claude status incident for elevated Opus 4.6 errors was posted on March 17 at 19:48 UTC, triggering a 106-comment Reddit thread documenting widespread impact. Separately, free-tier users report persistent 'Taking longer than usual' retries in a 61-comment thread, suggesting capacity strain across tiers. For teams running Claude Code in headless or CI pipelines, this incident underscores the need for retry logic and fallback model routing as operational requirements, not edge-case handling.