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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

"Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time": http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html

So the only take away is that now the population at large notices tech companies outages as much as they notice celebrity deaths?

"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?

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-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."

Already did that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610

Sure does look like we are way out there at the tail end of the probability distribution, by those numbers.

I mean, we can assume the downtime variance follows a normal distribution. It should pretty easy to calculate P<.05 with just a little bit of data.

What you say could be true, but I don't know that we can assume it. If downtime requires several things to happen (cascading errors), but those things interact somehow (problem with one makes another more likely), I could imagine it might not be normally distributed. Disclaimer: I Am Not A Statistician.

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

Reddit went down this morning too

Reddit goes down a lot though in my experience.

Reddit being up for 24 hours or generating pages in less than 3 seconds would be noteworthy.

Reddit goes down pretty frequently. It's been that way for years.

And now Discord is down!

no loss

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.

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?

Well, the options above cover pretty much every possibility, including the one I'm suggesting.

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

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