Last week was amazon, now its microsoft

I am a software developer. The chances of the entire internet crashing are extremely slim. There is a lot of redundancy built in.

Any company with common sense doesn't run a website or service on one machine (server). If one server goes down, the others pick up more of the load until another one starts up. Think of it like going to a fast food restaurant where 3 people are serving at the countrr with a little time to spare between customers. If one goes on break, the other two just serve more customers until they get back.

Companies will usually use at least 3 servers but often more, and they will often be spread so that a single failure will not take down the service. They might be placed on different power supplies so that a power cut doesn't take them all out, putting them in different cities, or I think the most extreme one I've heard is making sure they are on different tectonic plates for protection against earthquakes. Think of this like having two restaurants in case one of them is closed; or in the worst case, one burns down. The food can still be available via the other restaurnat. 

So with all those protections why did so much start going wrong? Human error most likely. News sites have reported DNS was the culprit in both cases, which is very suseptible to this kind of issue. DNS is like an address book or telephone directory. If you want to contact someone and know their name (or web address), you can look up the details of how to contact them in the address book. Someone has to keep the address book updated though. Most likely someone updated some records incorrectly, which meant the servers didn't know how to find each other.

Thankfully these kinds of issues tend to be rare, and no doubt Microsoft and Amazon will be looking into what went wrong, how to reduce the risk of it in future, and how to recover more quickly if it does happen. Aside from anything else, there will be significant financial losses to motivate them as a result. They're public companies so their stock will have tanked, companies pay for server time so they won't be getting paid for that, but it can also be written into some contracts they they have to pay their customers if they have significant outages.

The other point is probably that the internet is an extremely complicated system with many moving parts, with old things being removed and new things added every moment. It is probably inevitable that we will have these issues every so often.

This is the sort of thing we all get told so often and yet when one big server goes down it takes lots of things with it, what happens if you get a chain reaction of overloaded servers?

Like Robert, I too believe we should be more resilient, mistakes are bad enough, but what if it's a hostile actor who cuts undersea cables? 

We have some cash only shop here, theres a cash only chippy down the road, luckily it's opposite a cash machine, but places that don't take cash annoy me, especially those who expect everyone to have a smart phone, know how to use it and have all the different payment apps and internet banking etc.

TheCatWoman said:

what if it's a hostile actor who cuts undersea cables? 

There is a whole network of redundant connectivity that should kick in and still let the traffic flow around the world, just more slowly.

When I used to work in Bali (Indonesia) there would often be undersea volvanic / tectonic activity that would break the undersea cables so they would switch the the satellite connectivity which, while slower, was still able to get emails flowing and web pages loading.

With the likes of Starlink and other companies there is a lot more bandwidth that does not rely on the subsea cables any more and most big data transfter companies (Amazon, Apple, Netflix etc) have their data in different geographic locations so are not impacted by this sort of thing.

TheCatWoman said:

places that don't take cash annoy me, especially those who expect everyone to have a smart phone, know how to use it and have all the different payment apps and internet banking etc.

From the vendors perspective, the only significant portion of the UK who may not have a smartphone or type of electronic payment (debit card etc) is the 65+ group who are unlikely to be big consumers for them. I suspect the loss of potential earnings is small enough to justify the convenience of not needing to handle the notes/coins, maintain change levels and have the hassle of cashing up and going to the bank.

Even amongst the 65+ group I believe almost 80% have smart phones and probably a lot more have cards to pay with, so the numbers are statistically insignificant for the vendors.

In theory you only need the digital wallet that is installed on all smartphones to pay if you don't have a card and no banking app is needed. I think all bank current accounts offer at least a debit card which can be used instead of a smart phone too.

I guess the vendors are choosing convenience over inclusion since it makes financial sense for them.

TheCatWoman said:

what if it's a hostile actor who cuts undersea cables? 

There is a whole network of redundant connectivity that should kick in and still let the traffic flow around the world, just more slowly.

When I used to work in Bali (Indonesia) there would often be undersea volvanic / tectonic activity that would break the undersea cables so they would switch the the satellite connectivity which, while slower, was still able to get emails flowing and web pages loading.

With the likes of Starlink and other companies there is a lot more bandwidth that does not rely on the subsea cables any more and most big data transfter companies (Amazon, Apple, Netflix etc) have their data in different geographic locations so are not impacted by this sort of thing.

TheCatWoman said:

places that don't take cash annoy me, especially those who expect everyone to have a smart phone, know how to use it and have all the different payment apps and internet banking etc.

From the vendors perspective, the only significant portion of the UK who may not have a smartphone or type of electronic payment (debit card etc) is the 65+ group who are unlikely to be big consumers for them. I suspect the loss of potential earnings is small enough to justify the convenience of not needing to handle the notes/coins, maintain change levels and have the hassle of cashing up and going to the bank.

Even amongst the 65+ group I believe almost 80% have smart phones and probably a lot more have cards to pay with, so the numbers are statistically insignificant for the vendors.

In theory you only need the digital wallet that is installed on all smartphones to pay if you don't have a card and no banking app is needed. I think all bank current accounts offer at least a debit card which can be used instead of a smart phone too.

I guess the vendors are choosing convenience over inclusion since it makes financial sense for them.

D said:

Do you know how long it would take to replace a cable?

Service degradation lasted months there so I guess this would be the average repair time.

The cables are not typically modular so the whole thing would have be be laid again from scratch which takes weeks just to feed it from the back of a ship, never mind the route planning around obstacles like underwater volcanoes.

The cost of the cable itself it likely to be in the millions of pounds so an expensive proposition in an area like the Pacific Ring of Fire.

That's quite interesting about the undersea cables and volcanic activity. Do you know how long it would take to replace a cable?

Iain said:

I guess the vendors are choosing convenience over inclusion since it makes financial sense for them.

I was talking to an owner of a cashless bar once and they noted how it made a lot of things much easier. Not having to check for forged notes, no need to make sure they had the correct change, no taking the money to the bank or having it collected, no cash left on the premises, etc. I guess the savings/simplicity of that offset the transaction fees. 

The part of it I don't like is tips. When you're ordering and paying for things on an app or website, they will often ask if you at the point of ordering if you want to leave a tip, but I don't want to leave a tip and then find the service is bad. If the service is good though, I'm then left without a way to leave a tip. They should let you scan the QR codes again or something.