It’s load shedding. They’re reducing consumption for capacity balancing at your expense. Whenever there are rate limiting storms Claude gets dumber. They also shift capacity for new releases, and Claude gets dumber leading up to it.

Self run infrastructure won’t have this cost but you have to manage the capacity and rollouts yourself, at which point it’s more obvious what’s happening, but the effects will be the same. The not knowing makes it harder, but also harder to plan your own work around.