I used to work at Stripe, but not in quite a while. My job was focused on both increasing capacity and minimizing downtime. I have no information whatsoever on

I used to work at Stripe, but not in quite a while. My job was focused on both increasing capacity and minimizing downtime. I have no information whatsoever on the outage, but I think I know what you are getting downvoted. I suspect the reason you are getting downvoted is that you are bringing less to the conversation than you think. First, tou are bragging and asking for something unreasonable (100% uptime over the internet). Every system like this faces some downtime. Maybe it's as high as 7,8 or even 9 9s, but some degradation is unavoidable. Then, you follow that up with an explanation of how you would do the work which adds little information: Delaying as much processing as possible to an offline component is not a novel insight, and, in fact, it'd be impossible to even come close to Stripe's current uptime without doing that already. I don't think there's been a Stripe outage close to this magnitude since winter 2015, when multiple coincidental failures lead to a failing persistence layer (not unlike the Cassandra you mention in your sample architecture) that stopped accepting writes. Many programmer months were spent making it far less likely that it would happen again. Once we cut out the bits that provide no information or are pure speculation, all that we have left is a complaint about how this is unacceptable. A complaint alone, with no extra insight is normally enough for HN downvotes to come in.