8 ms·

Because no one cares enough, including users. Oddly this centralization allows a complete deferral of blame without you even doing anything: if you’re down, th

• alentred 11mo ago
  There is an upside too. Us humans, we also need our down time occasionally.
  • 867-5309 11mo ago
    globally coordinated
  • eastburnn 11mo ago
    Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays, it’s not just scrolling Twitter for fun. The internet can’t afford to just “give people mental health breaks.”
    • drunkpotato 11mo ago
      Actually, yes, it can. Chill a bit.
    • zamadatix 11mo ago
      The vast majority of the internet can afford that though, and not the entire thing needs to operate the same way.
    • KronisLV 11mo ago
      > Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays What happened to having a business continuity plan? E.g. when your IT system is down, writing down incoming orders manually and filling them into the system when it's restored? I have a creeping suspicion that people don't care about that, in which case they can't really expect more than to occasionally be forced into some downtime by factors outside of their control. Either it's important enough to have contingencies in place, or it's not. Downtime will happen either way, no matter how brilliant the engineers working at these large orgs are. It's just that with so much centralization (probably too much) the blast range of any one outage will be really large.
      • gspencley 11mo ago
        My wife and I own a small theatre. We can process orders in-store just fine. Our customers can even avoid online processing fees if they purchase in-store. And if our POS system went down, we could absolutely fall back to pencil and paper. Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online. We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.
        • HWR_14 11mo ago
          Does the flyer make it clear that in person sales will have a discount?
    • jergason 11mo ago
      Most businesses are totally fine if they have a few hours of downtime. More uptime is better, but treating an outage like a disaster or an e-commerce site like a power plant is more about software engineer egos than business or customer needs. If AWS is down, most businesses on AWS are also down, and it’s mostly fine for those businesses.
      • serial_dev 11mo ago
        If an hour outage costs you on average a million dollars, you have another 8.759 billion dollars to cover for the loss...
    • blitzar 11mo ago
      Shitposting on twitter should never have been a business or livelihood in the first place.
    • zero_shift 11mo ago
      Why not? It's better to have diverse, imperfect infrastructure, than one form of infra that goes down with devastating results. I'm being semi-flippant but people do need to cope with an internet that is less than 100% reliable. As the youth like to say, you need to touch grass Being less flippant: an economy that is completely reliant on the internet is one vulnerable to cyberattacks, malware, catastrophic hardware loss It also protects us from the malfeasance or incompetence of actors like Google (who are great stewards of internet infrastructure... until it's no longer in their interests)
    • afavour 11mo ago
      I’m not so sure about that. The pre-internet age had a lot of forced “mental health breaks”. Phone lines went down. Mail was delayed. Trains stalled. Businesses and livelihoods continued to thrive. The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
      • SJC_Hacker 11mo ago
        > we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one We don't need it, the owners want it
      • chipsrafferty 11mo ago
        We don't need it, but we might need it to maintain our quality of life now.
      • oceanplexian 11mo ago
        Just want to correct the record here, as someone who worked at a local CLEC where we took availability quite seriously before the age of the self-defeatist software engineer. Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
        • kazen44 11mo ago
          also, the availability of the routing and switching infrastructure of the internet must be atleast a factor higher then that of the world wide web. Physical network equipment is redundant and reliant enough that getting 5 minutes of downtime or less per year is totally doable. the web however... is a far different beast (and in my opinion, with an incentive which does not factor in reliability)
        • 11mo ago
    • JustExAWS 11mo ago
      I’ve worked in cloud consulting for a little over five years. I can say 95% of the time when I discuss the cost and complexity tradeoffs of their websites being down vs going multi region or god forbid “multi cloud”, they shrug and say, it will be fine if they are down for a couple of hours. This was the same when I was doing consulting inside (ie large companies willing to pay the premium cost of AWS ProServe consultants) and outside working at 3rd party companies.
    • luc_ 11mo ago
      > “give people mental health breaks.” try going outside
  • lxgr 11mo ago
    Oh, if only computers could continue working while I take a break, or teams continue working while I’m on PTO…
• therealdkz 11mo ago
  [dead]
• timeon 11mo ago
  But Spotify was not down. One social media was down. This: > if you’re down, that’s bad. But if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad. is just marketing. If you are down with some other websites it is still bad.
  • monooso 11mo ago
    > If you are down with some other websites it is still bad. In some cases, absolutely. For the vast majority, it really, really doesn't matter. (Source: my personal website is down and nobody cares, including me)
  • afavour 11mo ago
    Admittedly when I wrote that I was thinking about the recent AWS outage. Anecdotally, I asked friends and family about their experience and they assumed the internet was down. Almost everything at my work runs on Google cloud so we were still running but we observed a notable dip in traffic during the outage all the same. > it is still bad No doubt. But there’s a calculation to make, is it bad enough to spend the extra money on mitigations, to hire extra devops folks to manage it all… and in the majority of end user facing cases the answer is no, it isn’t.
    • lillecarl 11mo ago
      Where I've worked and we've been in the cloud I've always promoted just running in one AZ, I run my own things in one Hetzner DC (hel1). I've done hybrid cloud as well and in that case we only have one AZ for the on-premise stuff anyways (plus offsite backup) That one time when an AZ goes down and your infra successfully fails over to the other two isn't worth it for a lot of my scale companies, ops consultants seem to be chasing high cloud spend to justify their own high cost. I also factor in that I live in Sweden where most infrastructure outages are exceptionally rare. Ofc it depends on what kind of company you are and what you're providing.
• BeFlatXIII 11mo ago
  > if “the internet is down” people will put down their device and do something else In this case, the internet should be down more often.
  • jesterp 11mo ago
    If the internet is down is what it takes to get you to put it down once in a while, I think thats probably the problem.
• tjoff 11mo ago
  Users have no options because... everything has been centralized. So it doesn't matter if users care or not. Users are never a consideration today anyway.
  • kordlessagain 11mo ago
    It’s time to revolt.
    • jballanc 11mo ago
      More like it's time for the pendulum to swing back... We had very decentralized "internet" with BBSes, AOL, Prodigy, etc. Then we centralized on AOL (ask anyone over 40 if they remember "AOL Keyword: ACME" plastered all over roadside billboards). Then we revolted and decentralized across MySpace, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Then we centralized on Facebook. We are in the midst of a second decentralization... ...from an information consumer's perspective. From an internet infrastructure perspective, the trend has been consistently toward more decentralization. Initially, even after everyone moved away from AOL as their sole information source online, they were still accessing all the other sites over their AOL dial-up connection. Eventually, competitors arrived and, since AOL no longer had a monopoly on content, they lost their grip on the infrastructure monopoly. Later, moving up the stack, the re-centralization around Facebook (and Google) allowed those sources to centralize power in identity management. Today, though, people increasingly only authenticate to Facebook or Google in order to authenticate to some 3rd party site. Eventually, competitors for auth will arrive (or already have ahem passkeys coughcough) and, as no one goes to Facebook anymore anyway, they'll lose grip on identity management. It's an ebb and flow, but the fundamental capability for decentralization has existed in the technology behind the internet from the beginning. Adoption and acclimatization, however, is a much slower process.
      • 0ldblu3 11mo ago
        These centralized services do and did solve problems. I'm old enough to remember renting a quarter rack, racking my own server and other infrastructure, and managing all that. That option hasn't gone away, but there are layers of abstraction at work that many people probably haven't and don't want to be exposed to.
• ocdtrekkie 11mo ago
  This is essentially the entire IT excuse for going to anything cloud. I see IT engineers all the time justifying that the downtime stops being their problem and they stop being to blame for it. There's zero personal responsibility in trying to preserve service, because it isn't "their problem" anymore. Anyone who thinks the cloud makes service more reliable is absolutely kidding themselves, because everyone who made the decision to go that way already knows it isn't true, it just won't be their problem to fix it. If anyone in the industry actually cared about reliability and took personal stake in their system being up, everyone would be back on-prem.
  • RajT88 11mo ago
    Reliability is not even how the cloud got sold to the C Suite. Good God, when my last company started putting things on Azure back in 2015 stuff would break weekly, usually on Monday mornings. No, the value proposition was always about saving money, turning CapEx into OpEx. Direct quote from my former CEO maybe 9 years ago: We are getting out of the business of buying servers. Cloud engineering involves architecting for unexpected events: retry patterns, availability zones, multi-region fail over, that sort of thing. Now - does it all add up to cost savings? I could not tell you. I have seen some case studies, but I also have been around long enough to take those with a big grain of salt.
    • dig1 11mo ago
      > ...does it all add up to cost savings? IMHO it adds, but only if you are big enough. Netflix level. At that level, you go and dine with Bezos and negotiate a massive discount. For anyone else, I’d genuinely love to see the numbers that prove otherwise. > There's zero personal responsibility Unfortunately, this seems to be the unspoken mantra of modern IT management. Nobody wants to be directly accountable for anything, yet everyone wants to have their fingerprints on everything. A paradox of collaboration without ownership.
      • RajT88 11mo ago
        Cloud providers have formalized these deals actually. If you promise to spend X amount over Y period, you get Z discounts. And this is not reserved instances, this is an org level pricing deal. Some have been calling it anti-competitive and saying the regulators need to look at the practice.
• PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  More like "don't have choice". It's not like service provider gonna go to competition, because before you switch, it will be back. Frankly it's a blessing, always being able to blame the cloud that management forced company to migrate to be "cheaper" (which half of the time turns out to be false anyway)
• marticode 11mo ago
  As a user I do care, because I waste so much time on Cloudflare's "prove you are human" blocking-page (why do I have to prove it over and over again?), and frequently run on websites blocking me entirely based on some bad IP-blacklist used along with Cloudflare.
  • woooooo 11mo ago
    I just realized, why don't they have some "definitely human" third party cookie that caches your humanness for 24h or so? I'm sure there's a reason, I've heard third party cookies were less respected now, but can someone chime in on why this doesn't work and save a ton of compute?
    • acureau 11mo ago
      Because people will solve the challenge once, and then use the cookie in automation tools. It already happens with shorter expiration cookies.
      • woooooo 11mo ago
        Thanks, I'm now shaking my head at my naivete :)
    • lotsofpulp 11mo ago
      I assume that will be for Apple (and eventually Alphabet) to implement via digital IDs linked to real world IDs. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digital-id-a-new-way-to-create-and-present-an-id-in-apple-wallet/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digi...
      • philipwhiuk 11mo ago
        Don't worry, Sam Altman is selling the protection too -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)
    • 11mo ago
• baxtr 11mo ago
  Who cares if a couple of websites are down a day or even two? As long as HN is up and running, everything is going to be O.K.!
  • lobsterthief 11mo ago
    There was a problem posting your comment.
  • 52-6F-62 11mo ago
    Wealthy, investment-bloated software companies will be fine. Smaller companies that provide real world services or goods to make a much more meagre living that rely on some of the services sold to them by said software companies will be impacted much more greatly. Losing a day or two of sales to someone who relies on making sales every day can be a growing hardship. This doesn’t just impact developers. It’s exactly this kind of myopic thinking that leads to scenarios like mass outages.
    • carlosjobim 11mo ago
      You don't lose a day of sales, customers come back when the site is up again.
      • LamaOfRuin 11mo ago
        Some of them do. There are very few products or services where all of them will.
        • HWR_14 11mo ago
          Sure, but some people who were going to buy your competitors product forget about that and will instead find your product. I assume it all evens out.
      • 52-6F-62 11mo ago
        My friend, that is just not reality. And it's not just e-commerce t shirt slingers I am talking about here. You have to realize when software companies tell the world they should rely on their works, they world will do so. And once that occurs, the responsibility is all on the software companies to meet the expectations they built in people! It's mad that this industry works so hard to claim the trust of millions of people, then shirks it as soon as it's convenient. It's shameful.
• LtWorf 11mo ago
  > Because no one cares enough, including users. When have users been asked about anything?
• lxgr 11mo ago
  Many people care, but none of them can (sufficiently) change the underlying incentive structure to effect the necessary changes.
• mistrial9 11mo ago
  > Because no one cares enough, including users. this is like a bad motivational speaker talk.. heavy exhortations with a dramatic lack of actual reasoning. Systems are difficult, people. It is "incentives" of parties and lockin by tech design and vendors, not lack of individual effort.
• delfinom 11mo ago
  Eh? It's because they are offering a service too good to refuse. The internet this day is fucking dangerous and murderous as hell. We need Cloudflare just to keep services up due to the deluge of AI data scrapers and other garbage.
• thr0w 11mo ago
  > But if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad. In my direct experience, this isn't true if you're running something even vaguely mission-critical for your customers. Your customer's workers just know that they can't do their job for the day, and your customer's management just knows that the solution they shepherded through their organization is failing.
  • acedTrex 11mo ago
    It's really quite funny, many of the ACTUALLY vital systems to running the world as we know it are running off of very different softwares. Cloudflare appears to have a much higher % of non vital systems running on it than say something like akamai. If akamai went down i have a feeling you'd see a whole lot more real life chaos.
    • kazen44 11mo ago
      i also find the sentiment of "well we use a third party so blame them" completely baffeling. if you run anything even remotely mission critical, not having a plan B which is executable and of which you are in control (and a plan C) will make you look completely incompetent. There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse.
      • nobody9999 11mo ago
        >There are very, very few events which some people who run mission critical systems accept as force majeur. Most of those are of the scale "national emergency" or worse. And why should anyone be surprised? It's been about 80 years since "The buck stops here."[0] had any real relevance. And more's the pity. [0] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-buck-stops-here.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-buck-stops-here.html
• jclardy 11mo ago
  Which "user" are you referring to? Cloudflare users or end product users? End product users have no power, they can complain to support and maybe get a free month of service, but the 0.1% of customers that do that aren't going to turn the tide and have anything change. Engineering teams using these services also get "covered" by them - they can finger point and say "everyone else was down too."
• tjwebbnorfolk 11mo ago
  > if “the internet is down” people will put down their device and do something else. oh no
• ozgrakkurt 11mo ago
  On the other hand, it is cool to be up when the internet is down
• Hrun0 11mo ago
  > It also reduces your incentive to change, if “the internet is down” people will put down their device and do something else. Even if your web site is up they’ll assume it isn’t. I agree. When people talk about the enshittification of the internet, Cloudflare plays a significant role.
• ge96 11mo ago
  Also it's free (the basic domain protection offered by CF anyway)
• falcor84 11mo ago
  100% this. While in my professional capacity I'm all in for reliability and redundancy, as an individual, I quite like these situations when it's obvious that I won't be getting any work done and it's out of my control, so I can go run some errands to or read a book, or just finish early.
• pancsta 11mo ago
  > if you’re down, Spotify is down, social media is down… then “the internet is broken” and you don’t look so bad. Which changes nothing to you actually being down, youre only down more. CF proxies always sucked - not your domain, not your domain...