What is this?
The Claude Developer Misery Index measures how much developers are suffering during Claude AI outages and degradations. It combines the official Anthropic status page, recent incident history, and real-time complaint volume from Bluesky to produce a single score from 0 (bliss) to 10 (apocalypse).
Status pages are notoriously slow to update. By the time it officially says "Investigating," social media has already posted fifteen "is it just me?" threads. The Misery Index captures that gap — and the uncomfortable truth about how dependent we've all become on AI to write our code.
Reddit is the primary social signal — r/ClaudeAI is where developers go to vent when things break. But Reddit blocks API access from cloud IPs, so we built a separate service that fetches Reddit data and pushes it alongside the Bluesky results collected by the GitHub Action. Bluesky serves as a secondary signal with a free, open API that runs from the cloud just fine.
Data sources
Anthropic Status Page — the ground truth. Provides a system-level indicator (none, minor, major, critical) and per-component status for claude.ai, the API, Claude Code, and more.
Reddit — the primary social signal. Searches r/ClaudeAI (and occasionally r/ChatGPT) for outage and degradation posts. Weighted higher than Bluesky because r/ClaudeAI has concentrated developer discussion with better signal-to-noise for outage complaints. Posts older than 24h are only included if they have 5+ comments (catches active megathreads).
Bluesky — the secondary social signal. Searches for posts containing phrases like "Claude is down," "Claude outage," and "Claude not working." Uses multi-layer filtering to avoid false positives: exclusion patterns for past-tense, positive sentiment, and dependency humor; signal tiering (strong outage signals count alone, weak signals need corroboration). Post volume and reply depth both contribute to the score.
The formula
The Misery Index is the sum of four components, capped at 10.
1. Status page (0–8 points)
| Indicator | Points |
|---|---|
| none | 0 — all systems operational |
| minor | +2 |
| major | +4 |
| critical | +6 |
| + per degraded component | +0.5 each (max +2) |
2. Reddit (0–5 points) — primary social signal
Active megathreads count as 5 posts each. Only counted if data is fresh (<30 min).
| Effective posts | Points |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0 |
| 1–2 | +0.5 |
| 3–4 | +1 |
| 5–9 | +2 |
| 10–19 | +3 |
| 20–29 | +4 |
| 30+ | +5 |
3. Bluesky post volume (0–2 points) — secondary signal
| Posts (24h) | Points |
|---|---|
| 0 | 0 |
| 1–4 | +0.5 |
| 5–14 | +1 |
| 15–29 | +1.5 |
| 30+ | +2 |
4. Bluesky reply amplifier (0–1 point)
| Total replies | Points |
|---|---|
| 0–29 | 0 |
| 30–74 | +0.5 |
| 75+ | +1 |
The status page carries the most weight because confirmed outages are the most reliable signal. Reddit is the primary social signal — r/ClaudeAI is a focused developer community where outage discussion concentrates. Active megathreads with hundreds of comments are weighted heavily. Bluesky provides supplementary coverage but with lower volume and more noise.
Misery levels
How data is collected
Data is refreshed every 15 minutes automatically. The dashboard also fetches live status and incident data directly, so it stays current between refreshes.
History is preserved for 7 days. Use the time toggle (24h / 3d / 7d) below the gauge to adjust what window all sections display.
Limitations
This is a fun side project, not an SLA monitor. Keyword matching is imperfect — some posts are about general slowness rather than outages, and some genuine complaints use different phrasing. The 15-minute polling interval means short blips might be missed entirely.
The index also doesn't distinguish between "Claude is down for everyone" and "Claude is slow for some users." Both generate social posts, but the severity is very different. Use the official status page for actual incident tracking.
Source code
The full source is on GitHub. The data pipeline runs as a GitHub Action with no external infrastructure.