5 ms·

Write a script to fire random events and you will notice they sometimes cluster in ways that look like a pattern.

by idlewords 7y ago

rossdavidh 7y ago
Oh, sure. But Apple, Google, Cloudflare, Stripe, Slack, Microsoft, we're getting to more than five even...
- mattwad 7y ago
  Reddit went down this morning too
  - gpm 7y ago
    Reddit goes down a lot though in my experience.
  - kabwj 7y ago
    Reddit being up for 24 hours or generating pages in less than 3 seconds would be noteworthy.
  - gnulinux 7y ago
    Reddit goes down pretty frequently. It's been that way for years.
- opencl 7y ago
  And now Discord is down!
  - gsich 7y ago
    no loss
- root_axis 7y ago
  The logic of the GP still applies though. Sites have outages every day so it is inevitable that some large sites will fail around the same time. Also, we know that Cloudflare and Twitter outages were attributed to configuration changes, probably others have benign explanations as well.
  - rossdavidh 7y ago
    Sure, but "configuration changes" does not exclude several of these options. For example, is it harder to predict/deal with the consequences of configuration changes than it used to be?
    - root_axis 7y ago
      Well, the options above cover pretty much every possibility, including the one I'm suggesting.
rossdavidh 7y ago
You know, it would be cool if you found stats on the downtime metrics of these various high-profile recent outages, and calculated the odds of having such a cluster. Statistics is hard, though, and avoiding a "Texas Bulls-eye" would be hard.
- wtallis 7y ago
  "Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time": http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html
  - gcbw2 7y ago
    So the only take away is that now the population at large notices tech companies outages as much as they notice celebrity deaths?
    - uxp 7y ago
      "population at large" This thread is linked to a status page run by Twitter, on a programming and technology news site. I'm not really seeing how most people that exist in the western/1st world are noticing this. Is there a CNN article, or FoxNews segment on how tech companies are having outages?
      - gcbw2 7y ago
        Yes, fox news even suggest it was part of a large coordinated censorship effort on the POTUS :D https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-suffers-widespread-outage https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-suffers-widespread-outa... quote from that url: "The outage came as President Trump was hosting a social media summit with right-wing personalities and tech industry critics who've accused Twitter and other websites of having an anti-conservative bias."
- appleiigs 7y ago
  Already did that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610
shobith 7y ago
This. I have first hand experience in this phenomenon multiple times. Complexity helps this effect too.

Write a script to fire random events and you will notice they sometimes cluster in ways that look like a pattern.

rossdavidh 7y ago

Oh, sure. But Apple, Google, Cloudflare, Stripe, Slack, Microsoft, we're getting to more than five even...

mattwad 7y ago
Reddit went down this morning too
- gpm 7y ago
  Reddit goes down a lot though in my experience.
- kabwj 7y ago
  Reddit being up for 24 hours or generating pages in less than 3 seconds would be noteworthy.
- gnulinux 7y ago
  Reddit goes down pretty frequently. It's been that way for years.
opencl 7y ago
And now Discord is down!
- gsich 7y ago
  no loss
root_axis 7y ago
The logic of the GP still applies though. Sites have outages every day so it is inevitable that some large sites will fail around the same time. Also, we know that Cloudflare and Twitter outages were attributed to configuration changes, probably others have benign explanations as well.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  Sure, but "configuration changes" does not exclude several of these options. For example, is it harder to predict/deal with the consequences of configuration changes than it used to be?
  - root_axis 7y ago
    Well, the options above cover pretty much every possibility, including the one I'm suggesting.

rossdavidh 7y ago

You know, it would be cool if you found stats on the downtime metrics of these various high-profile recent outages, and calculated the odds of having such a cluster. Statistics is hard, though, and avoiding a "Texas Bulls-eye" would be hard.

wtallis 7y ago
"Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time": http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html
- gcbw2 7y ago
  So the only take away is that now the population at large notices tech companies outages as much as they notice celebrity deaths?
  - uxp 7y ago
    "population at large" This thread is linked to a status page run by Twitter, on a programming and technology news site. I'm not really seeing how most people that exist in the western/1st world are noticing this. Is there a CNN article, or FoxNews segment on how tech companies are having outages?
    - gcbw2 7y ago
      Yes, fox news even suggest it was part of a large coordinated censorship effort on the POTUS :D https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-suffers-widespread-outage https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-suffers-widespread-outa... quote from that url: "The outage came as President Trump was hosting a social media summit with right-wing personalities and tech industry critics who've accused Twitter and other websites of having an anti-conservative bias."
appleiigs 7y ago
Already did that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610

shobith 7y ago

This. I have first hand experience in this phenomenon multiple times. Complexity helps this effect too.