Why Is Claude So Slow? Fix Latency & Delay

When Claude's response times slow down significantly, or when the cursor blinks for several minutes without producing text, you are experiencing degraded performance. This lag can be caused by server congestion, browser memory limits, or excessively long chat histories.

Follow these troubleshooting steps to identify the bottleneck and speed up Claude's output.

1. Verify Global Performance Degradation

Your first step is to check if Anthropic is experiencing system-wide latency.

1. Navigate to status.anthropic.com.
2. Look under the "Component Status" section for any mentions of Degraded Performance or increased latency on the Web App.
3. If Anthropic lists an active incident involving high response times, the issue is infrastructure-wide. Their engineers are likely routing traffic to backup server clusters, and normal speeds will return once load balancing is restored.

2. Start a New Chat Session

Claude's underlying model must reprocess the entire chat history every time you send a new message. If you are working within a very long conversation thread, the time-to-first-token (TTFT) will increase exponentially.

1. Look at your current chat sidebar. If the conversation contains dozens of messages or several large document attachments, it has reached a high token count.
2. Click Start New Chat or the "+ " button at the top left of the screen.
3. Copy only the most relevant summary or context from your previous session and paste it into the new thread.
4. Send a test message. You should see an immediate, dramatic increase in generation speed.

3. Disable Hardware Acceleration Conflicts

Render latency in the browser can make it appear as though Claude is slow, when in fact your computer's GPU is struggling to render the incoming streaming text interface.

1. In Google Chrome: Click the three dots (top-right) > Settings > System.
2. Toggle off Use graphics acceleration when available.
3. Relaunch your browser and test Claude again.
4. If this improves the speed, the issue was a rendering bottleneck caused by your browser's interaction with your display drivers.

4. Clear Local Storage and Cache

A bogged-down browser local storage can hinder the performance of the React/Next.js framework running the Claude web application.

1. On the Claude.ai tab, press F12 to open Developer Tools.
2. Go to the Application tab (or Storage tab in Firefox).
3. In the left menu, expand Local Storage and select https://claude.ai.
4. Click Clear All or right-click and choose clear.
5. Repeat this process for Session Storage and IndexedDB.
6. Refresh the page, log back in, and evaluate the response speeds.

When to escalate

If you are a Claude Pro subscriber and your response speeds remain slow (taking longer than 30 seconds to begin generating text) over a 24-hour period, submit a ticket to the Anthropic billing and support team at support.anthropic.com. Paid tiers are routed through priority capacity queues; persistent slowness indicates a potential routing error on your account profile.