How Long Until a Claude MCP Tool Call Times Out?
My monitor showed a spinning cursor for four minutes straight. No error. No crash log. Just silence while a client's build pipeline sat frozen inside Claude Desktop, waiting on an MCP tool call that never returned. That night taught me more about timeout behavior than any documentation page has. So how long until a Claude MCP tool call actually times out? If you build or maintain Model Context Protocol integrations, the honest answer depends on which Claude product you run, which transport your server uses, and whether you have touched a single config file since installing it. The 60-Second MCP Wall: Why Claude Desktop Times Out Thirty to sixty seconds is where most people first notice trouble. Anthropic does not publish that as a hard limit anywhere. It is simply the number that keeps showing up in bug reports once a tool call runs long enough to hit a second layer of timeout sitting underneath the one you can actually configure. Understanding the Default ...
