Anthropic's Claude hit by 'usage credits' error, Anthropic working on fix

Claude users reported Fable 5 issues, receiving a “usage credits are required” error.

Anthropic acknowledged the outage and applied a fix to resolve the erroneous usage credit requirement for Fable 5.

Fable 5 is Anthropic’s flagship Mythos-class AI model for autonomous knowledge work and complex coding.

The outage started at 2:06pm EDT on July 17, 2026, peaked around 2:21pm EDT, and lasted roughly 40 minutes.

Over 400 users reported the issue on Down Detector; 38% reported problems with Claude Code, 33% with Claude Chat.