Everything Is Down

I’ve been telling people this is a terrible idea since many people on this site were literal babies.

I’ve also been telling people centralized OIDC identity owned by a couple oligopoly vendors that have no incentive to care about normal users is a terrible idea for the same length of time.

Unfortunately convenience is the most powerful force in computing. People will trade security, privacy, autonomy, resilience, ownership of their own data and even ownership of IP, and vendor neutrality (avoiding lock in) for something convenient that “just works.” 90%+ of people will make this trade every single time.

It’s a big reason that FOSS never makes it outside techie circles or the back office / cloud. The cost and difficult of making a product easy to use for regular people increases exponentially as you go up the “easy-ness” gradient. Only businesses with real money can afford to make software usable.

Often making software usable is many times harder and more labor intensive than making the base software work. This is because computers are actually very hard to use and confusing. If you don’t agree it means you are an expert and don’t see the difficulty any more, in the same way that e.g. an athlete might not understand what’s so hard about difficult physical tasks.

Downdetector is end-user-reported, and the numbers look reasonable, so I'd say it's doing fine. I think more likely the cloudflare outage is causing failures that end users are reporting as outages in the service cloudflare is supposed to be proxying.

The cloud is just somebody else's server.

HN uses crimeflare.

And you're kind of expected to work if you're north of about 16

AWS is up for me, where do you see they're a part of the outage?