Claude Code users have been flooding GitHub and Reddit over the last few days with complaints that their usage limits are being exhausted at a suspiciously fast rate, with many reporting that sessions meant to last hours are literally burning out in minutes.
Online reports began trickling in on March 23 and haven't let up since. Multiple Claude Max subscribers say their 5-hour session windows have been depleted within one to two hours using the same workloads that previously caused no problems.
Some users report even more extreme behavior. According to a GitHub issue, Max 5x users claim their rate was spent after roughly 90 minutes of normal agentic tasks, while one Max 20x subscriber witnessed their usage jump from 21% to 100% on a single prompt. It's a bad look for the $100/$200-a-month tiers, which tout up to 5 or 20 times more usage per session than the $20 Pro plan, respectively.
The complaints can be found across multiple Reddit threads in r/ClaudeCode and r/Anthropic, where users have been discussing refunds, cancellations, and whether Anthropic quietly changed how usage is metered.
If it is a bug, it's not the first time. Less than a month ago, Anthropic reset Claude Code rate limits after a prompt caching bug caused usage to drain way faster than expected.
Ironically, the company recently launched a temporary promotion through March 28 that doubles usage limits during off-peak hours for Free, Pro, Max, and Team subscribers. Whether the latest round of complaints is down to a new bug or simply the consequence of a continuing surge in popularity is unknown, although the latter seems unlikely. Most of the complaints appear related to Anthropic's frontier model, Opus 4.6.
Anthropic has yet to publicly comment on the reports.
Update: Since this story was published, Anthropic's Thariq Shihipar has released the following statement:
"To manage growing demand for Claude we're adjusting our 5 hour session limits for free/Pro/Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged. During weekdays between 5am–11am PT / 1pm–7pm GMT, you'll move through your 5-hour session limits faster than before.
"We've landed a lot of efficiency wins to offset this, but ~7% of users will hit session limits they wouldn't have before, particularly for pro tiers.
"If you run token-intensive background jobs, shifting them to off-peak hours will stretch your session limits further. Overall weekly limits stay the same, just how they're distributed across the week is changing.
"I know this was frustrating. We're continuing to invest in scaling efficiently. I'll keep you posted on progress."
