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Comment by sotix | Hacker News Reader

This might sound crazy as a software engineer, but I actually like the occasional "snow day" where everything goes down. It's healthy for us to all disconnect from the internet for a bit. The centralization unintentionally helps facilitate that. At least, that's my glass half full perspective.

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I can understand that sentiment. Just don't lose sight of the impact it can have on every day people. My wife and I own a small theatre and we sell tickets through Eventbrite. It's not my full time job but it is hers. Eventbrite sent out an email this morning letting us know that they are impacted by the outage. Our event page appears to be working but I do wonder if it's impacting ticket sales for this weekend's shows.

So while us in tech might like a "snow day", there are millions of small businesses and people trying to go about their day to day lives who get cut off because of someone else's fuck-ups when this happens.

Absolutely solid point; there are a couple of apps I use daily for productivity, chores, even for alarm scheduling, that with the free versions, the ads wouldn’t load so I couldn’t use them but some of them were updated already. Made me realize I forgot that we’re kind of like cyborgs relying on technology that’s integrated so deeply into our lives that all it takes is an EMP blast like a monopolistic service going down to bring -us- down until we take a breath and learn how to walk again. Wild time.

> This might sound crazy as a software engineer, but I actually like the occasional "snow day" where everything goes down

As as software engineer, I get it. as a CTO, I spent this morning triaging with my devops ai(actual Indian) to find some workaround (we found one) while our CEO was doing damage control with customers (non technical field) who were angry that we were down and they were losing business by the minute.

sometimes I miss not having a direct stake in the success of the business.

I'm guessing you're employed and your salary is guaranteed regardless. Would you have the same outlook if you were the self-employed founder of an online business and every minute of outage was costing you money?

What are you paying in order to be down?

Even if you were making a million a minute, typically, it still didn't cost you a thing, nor have you lost anything.

You're not making as much, sure, but neither a cost, nor a loss.

For businesses whose profit margins are already slim, which is most traditional businesses trading online, making less money than they usually would will put them into the red, and even for those that are still in profit, making less money than you usually would means you have less money to pay the expenses that you usually do, expenses that are predicated on you making a certain amount of revenue.

If you're an event organizer whose big event is in two days, for example, then every minute your website's down translates to people not paying to attend your paid event. Bonus points because as event managers know, people often wait until 2 days before the event to subscribe for good. Bonus points if you knew this and therefore ran a costly email campaign just before the outage, a campaign that is now sitting at a near-0% click rate.

Don't ask me how I know.

your house isn't going into foreclosure because your shop went down for a day.

That's a weirdly flippant response to what's a serious issue, but I'll give it the courtesy of a reply anyway - maybe not, but a business not making enough profit might go under, or they might only have to fire someone to prevent that from happening.

any brick and mortar store can have an outage, sometimes multiple days when they repave the streets or have a utility outage. You are white-knighting for imaginary victims of imaginary tragedies. thats weird

You're living in a bubble. I know enough people who live paycheck to paycheck and always have exactly $0 in their pocket before the end of the month. It's pretty normal in some parts of the world, maybe even most of them.

I mean, you don't really know that, do you?

Maybe Tuesdays tend to be a big day for me, and instead of "down for a day", it's "lose almost a quarter of my income for the month".

Cloudflare is pretty pervasive, there are all kinds of people and businesses, in all kinds of situations, impacted by this.

You can make any leaps of logic into chaos theory. hell, maybe a fully-occupied orphanage will burn down because of some percolation of events that wouldn't have occurred had CloudFlare kept running. Maybe the next genocidal leader was conceived at the precise moment because CloudFlare was down and his parents used the time to make whoopie?

If the internet was just social media, SaaS productivity suites, and AI slop, sure...

But there are systems that depend on Cloudflare, directly or not, and when they go down it can have a serious impact on somebody's livelihood.

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