Yes such things are global mutable state. Worse yet, for big systems "global" means "global to an earth-wide network", not just to a single process. That's wh

Yes such things are global mutable state. Worse yet, for big systems "global" means "global to an earth-wide network", not just to a single process. That's why the design discussions about how to do stuff on such networks always centre on how to manage this global, distributed, mutable state. It really is hard stuff. The nice thing, is that once you have done that design work, and are programming "in the small" to implement it, the individual processes can be stateless.