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What's the impact for most sites if they go down a few times a year due to AWS/CloudFlare?

dijit 3y ago
Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? What if its more than a few hours because theres a natural monopoly and a dearth of capable people to run systems independently - thus no strong external incentive for rapid response outside of punitive SLAs? How much soft power do you think such an entity would have on the world stage.
- solardev 3y ago
  > Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? People get some off-screen time? Life goes on. > What if its more than a few hours because theres a natural monopoly?[...snip...] How much soft power do you think such an entity would have on the world stage. They're just commodity infra providers. The Facebook and Twitters of the world have way more power and influence. This isn't even a hypothetical. The big cloud providers have been around for what, a decade or so now? How many times has the world collapsed with every Cloudflare or AWS downtime? It's just not as big a deal as you paint it to be. These providers going down is like the digital equivalent of a highway crash -- a small inconvenience for a few hours, then forgotten about in a day or two.
- shepherdjerred 3y ago
  > Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? Okay, so obviously a lot of "important" stuff happens via the Internet. You could come up with some financial impact if the Internet went down for some time. Harder to measure: A lot of people would be inconvenienced or suffer. Some number of people would die indirectly, e.g. due to emergencies/lack of communication. People are inconvenienced and suffer and die all of the time. It's part of life. I'm not advocating for more death and suffering, but I am saying that, as another comment said, "life goes on". --- Put another way, if the Internet disappeared for a week, month, year, what would happen? It'd suck and we'd adjust, but we (humanity as a whole) would be fine.

Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? What if its more than a few hours because theres a natural monopoly and a dearth of capable people to run systems independently - thus no strong external incentive for rapid response outside of punitive SLAs? How much soft power do you think such an entity would have on the world stage.

solardev 3y ago
> Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? People get some off-screen time? Life goes on. > What if its more than a few hours because theres a natural monopoly?[...snip...] How much soft power do you think such an entity would have on the world stage. They're just commodity infra providers. The Facebook and Twitters of the world have way more power and influence. This isn't even a hypothetical. The big cloud providers have been around for what, a decade or so now? How many times has the world collapsed with every Cloudflare or AWS downtime? It's just not as big a deal as you paint it to be. These providers going down is like the digital equivalent of a highway crash -- a small inconvenience for a few hours, then forgotten about in a day or two.
shepherdjerred 3y ago
> Whats the impact if the entire internet is down for a couple of hours? Okay, so obviously a lot of "important" stuff happens via the Internet. You could come up with some financial impact if the Internet went down for some time. Harder to measure: A lot of people would be inconvenienced or suffer. Some number of people would die indirectly, e.g. due to emergencies/lack of communication. People are inconvenienced and suffer and die all of the time. It's part of life. I'm not advocating for more death and suffering, but I am saying that, as another comment said, "life goes on". --- Put another way, if the Internet disappeared for a week, month, year, what would happen? It'd suck and we'd adjust, but we (humanity as a whole) would be fine.