Image: Claude Status
Claude subscribers who saw their usage limits vanish on October 27 now have at least a partial explanation, and it is not one they wanted. A Claude Pro user says Anthropic support confirmed that retries caused by service errors count toward paid usage limits, and that the lost usage will not be given back.
Claude Code usage exploded 8x today. Anthropic confirmed service errors consume our paid limits and they won't compensate users
— Zayden (@Zaydenf9) October 28, 2026
The claim comes from a post on r/ClaudeAI by u/PreEchoDev, who uses Claude Code for software development. The user wrote that their 5 hour allowance began disappearing unusually fast that day, with around 10% of it gone in about three minutes at one point.
What the numbers show
Using the open source ccusage tool, the user compared local Claude Code logs across October. October 27 came to about 1.306 billion tokens against a previous daily average of 161 million, roughly 8.1 times higher. Output tokens rose from about 303,000 to 7.97 million, and the estimated API equivalent cost climbed from $41.17 to $493.04.
The user was careful to note that these are local statistics, that the totals include cache reads, and that not all of the jump can be pinned on Anthropic. Longer sessions or model changes may have played a part, according to the post.
What support said
According to replies quoted in the post, support acknowledged two resolved incidents of elevated errors for Claude Sonnet 5.5 that day and said such errors can cause retries that burn through usage faster than normal. Support also said retries triggered by service errors do count toward usage limits, and that usage consumed during retries or incidents cannot be refunded, credited, or compensated through subscription extensions or discounts. One reply called the answer final. The user says the complaint has since been passed to human support.
We finally have an explanation for "Claude Code eats my limits for no reason." At least part of it.
— Rahul (@sairahul1) October 28, 2026
Anthropic support just told a Pro user that retries from their own Sonnet 5.5 outages count against your limits. Two outages on Oct 27. His usage: 8x his normal day.
Anthropic's status page confirms both incidents. The first ran from about 2:44 PM to 3:26 PM IST. For the second, Anthropic says impact lasted from 8:12 PM to 8:47 PM IST and hit claude.ai, the Claude API, Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
Others report the same
Similar complaints surfaced on r/ClaudeCode on October 28, according to the ccmaf.dev news feed. One user on the $100 a month plan wrote that 73% of their weekly limit was gone after two days, listing 146 million tokens on Monday and 1.515 billion on Tuesday.
Anthropic has not made a public statement on the issue at the time of this writing. The support replies have not been independently confirmed, and the company may still change course after a human review.
What affected users can do
Subscribers who rely on Claude Code can take a few steps to limit the damage. Check the Claude status page before a long session, and pause heavy agent runs while an incident is open, since automatic retries during errors appear to count against limits. Keep an eye on usage through the built in usage view or a tool like ccusage, so an unusual spike shows up early. Users who believe they lost usage to an outage can still file a support ticket with logs and timestamps, which gives Anthropic a clear record even if the current policy stands.
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