Businesses and peoples’ livelihoods are online nowadays, it’s not just scrolling Twitter for fun.
The internet can’t afford to just “give people mental health breaks.”
The internet can’t afford to just “give people mental health breaks.”
What happened to having a business continuity plan? E.g. when your IT system is down, writing down incoming orders manually and filling them into the system when it's restored?
I have a creeping suspicion that people don't care about that, in which case they can't really expect more than to occasionally be forced into some downtime by factors outside of their control.
Either it's important enough to have contingencies in place, or it's not. Downtime will happen either way, no matter how brilliant the engineers working at these large orgs are. It's just that with so much centralization (probably too much) the blast range of any one outage will be really large.
Doesn't change the fact that 99% of our ticket sales happen online. People will even come in to the theatre to check us out (we're magicians and it's a small magic shop + magic-themed theatre - so people are curious and we get a lot of foot traffic) but, despite being in the store, despite being able to buy tickets right then and there and despite the fact that it would cost less to do so ... they invariably take a flyer and scan the QR code and buy online.
We might be kind of niche, since events usually sell to groups of people and it's rare that someone decides to attend an event by themselves right there on the spot. So that undoubtedly explains why people behave like this - they're texting friends and trying to see who is interested in going. But I'm still bringing us up as an example to illustrate just how "online" people are these days. Being online allows you to take a step back, read the reviews, price shop, order later and have things delivered to your house once you've decided to commit to purchasing. That's just normal these days for so many businesses and their customers.
The idea that we absolutely need 24/7 productivity is a new one and I’m not that convinced by it. Obviously there are some scenarios that need constant connectivity but those are more about safety (we don’t want the traffic lights to stop working everywhere) than profit.
We don't need it, the owners want it
Phone lines absolutely did not go down. Physical POTS lines (Yes, even the cheap residential ones) were required to have around 5 9s of availability, or approximately 5 minutes per year. And that's for a physical medium affected by weather, natural disasters, accidents, and physical maintenance. If we or the LEC did not meet those targets contracts would be breached and worst case the government would get involved.
Physical network equipment is redundant and reliant enough that getting 5 minutes of downtime or less per year is totally doable.
the web however... is a far different beast (and in my opinion, with an incentive which does not factor in reliability)
If AWS is down, most businesses on AWS are also down, and it’s mostly fine for those businesses.
This was the same when I was doing consulting inside (ie large companies willing to pay the premium cost of AWS ProServe consultants) and outside working at 3rd party companies.
try going outside
It's better to have diverse, imperfect infrastructure, than one form of infra that goes down with devastating results.
I'm being semi-flippant but people do need to cope with an internet that is less than 100% reliable. As the youth like to say, you need to touch grass
Being less flippant: an economy that is completely reliant on the internet is one vulnerable to cyberattacks, malware, catastrophic hardware loss
It also protects us from the malfeasance or incompetence of actors like Google (who are great stewards of internet infrastructure... until it's no longer in their interests)