Comment by tjwebbnorfolk
5 days ago
Every HN comment seems to say the same thing: downtime is inexcusable and the centralization of these services is ruining the internet.
I still don't see the big deal. 12 hours of downtime once every couple years isn't the end of the world. So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours -- banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived. Twitter is down? Oh what a tragedy. Customers get some refunds, Cloudflare fixes the issue, and people move on with life.
Cars still break down occasionally after 100+ years of engineering for reliability and safety. The power still goes out every now and then. Cook on the stove. The cost of making everything perfect all the time just isn't worth it.
I run my own servers on my own network and do not use Cloudflare. My stuff goes down too. And it's "decentralized" in the way you think the internet "should" be, which entails its own risks. So what do you all want, exactly? A public lashing of every developer at Cloudflare who pushes a bug to prod? A congressional investigation? I just don't understand the outrage here.
Stuff breaks occasionally. Get used to it, and design accordingly.
> So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours, banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived.
1. I believe it's payment processing systems not functioning properly that causes real problems for people and not simply bank websites being down. Especially given...
2. Banks being closed so much back when cash/checks were actually widely used wasn't an issue because you could just pop over to an ATM or whip out a checkbook. In today's system, every single purchase you make requires communication between the merchant, your bank, and any number of middlemen via the internet.
Yeah, cash is still used today but I've been noticing even things like school sports events have stopped taking cash all together and simply post a QR code to buy from your phone.
That is unless the school has crap cell reception (with no public Wi-Fi either!), Cloudflare shits the bed, Visa thinks you're buying porn, you locked your debit card and now can't unlock it cuz the website is down, or any one of the million things that break all the time. Replace school sports event with literally every single things that requires a financial transaction and it's easy to see how even a short outage can lead to actual harm being realized.
From a consumers perspective, that makes sense. From a business's perspective, downtime can mean significant loss of revenue or new business opportunity.
The costs of perfection are much, much greater. Are you willing to pay 2-3x the cost of everything to go from 99.999% to 100.0000000% uptime?
Probably the only thing in existence with 100.00% uptime are our nuclear missile command and control systems. Like, even my pen runs out of ink sometimes. It's just crazy how hard it is to have stuff work all the time.
I feel obligated to point out that basically no commercial service that relies on a big tech company has better than 99.99% uptime anymore. Your example isn't just hyperbolic, it avoid the actual problem. It isn't that "a bit more reliable" is "nontrivial less reliable than 5 years ago."
I wonder if consolidation actually makes this less of an issue for businesses?
If my website is down, but my competitors' isn't, I might lose business to them. If my competitor's website is also down, where are the customers gonna go?