[Service Disruption] Max 20x window burned with no productive output — rate-limit failures Apr 28–29 2026

Summary

Filing as a paid Max 20x subscriber experiencing the same window-burn pattern that was acknowledged in the Apr 23 engineering postmortem, recurring through Apr 28–29 alongside the Apr 28 platform outage.

Symptoms

• Current 5-hour session window: ~90% consumed, effectively zero productive output.
• Repeated 429 rate-limit responses on Claude Code retries.
• Failed Deep Research jobs that consumed quota without returning completed reports.
• Pattern matches the March 26 thinking-history token-burn bug described in the Apr 23 postmortem (idle-session thinking history was supposed to clear once but cleared every turn, dramatically inflating token usage).

Environment

• Plan: Max 20x
• Claude Code: v2.1.117 (post-fix per the Apr 23 postmortem)
• OS: macOS (Darwin 24.6.0)
• Date of impact: 2026-04-28 → 2026-04-29
• Overlapping with: the Apr 28 ~17:41–19:00 UTC major outage on status.anthropic.com

Why I'm filing here

The Apr 23 announcement noted three bugs affecting Claude Code, the Agent SDK, and Cowork, and Anthropic reset usage limits for all subscribers as compensation. The current burn behavior on v2.1.117 looks indistinguishable from the pre-fix pattern, at least for users running Deep Research–heavy workloads through Claude Code sessions. Flagging here so engineering has a current-version data point.

What would help

• Confirmation of whether residual symptoms post-Apr 23 fix are expected, or whether a new regression has been observed.
• Guidance on capturing diagnostics that would be useful (request IDs, anthropic-ratelimit-* headers, transcript artifacts) — happy to attach.
• For account-specific credit, I have a separate ticket open with support.

For other affected users

If you're seeing the same thing, please add a comment with: plan tier, Claude Code version, approximate timestamps (UTC), and whether the workload was Claude Code, Deep Research, or both. Aggregated data will help engineering scope the residual issue.

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Mark as duplicate if there's an existing megathread for this window — I searched and didn't find one, but happy to consolidate.