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I heard similar but haven't found a "no, it wasn't a monkey" article yet.

The point is that the monkey was only the trigger. But the full cause of an outage is much more than just the trigger. It's a monkey this time, could have been an operator or a storm...

Digging a bit deeper, they appear to be running with very little margin, if any. Meaning redundancy and protection against cascading failures is limited.

Fixing the real cause is expensive, so it's often easier to just blame the trigger—though admittedly in this case it makes for a great headline. :)

or a kite.

It's not like the monkey deployed special monkey skills beyond "occupy space while being electrically conductive".

OK, in all fairness I did think all we were talking about was the trigger, not the underlying vulnerable system (which I already had understood to be less than solid over the years.)

In other words the monkey was only the straw that broke the camels back.

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