Aside from infrastructure woes like this, one of the original premises of the internet's resilience was its decentralized and organic design, however, as developers migrate to the cloud we are going in the exact opposite direction where a single cloud provider going down takes with it a ton of popular web services. We have moved to the mainframe model and the new IT dept is now GAE, AWS etc. While cloud providers try to decentralize their infrastructure it seems that we are in the early days of figuring out how to do this, because for the past few days we have had major disruption to essential services like tumblr (for kitten photos) et al.

Fortunately to date the affected services are all non essential, mainly entertainment/trivial stuff like blogs, instagram, dropbox etc etc, but when we start to see things like water supply and electrical power management systems, hospital records, aviation system etc affected the consequences could be severe.

If the very best IT minds at AWS and GAE can't keep their systems running, what hope have government departments got? Anyone that's ever been to a DMV, or USPS knows just how good the US Government’s IT departments are.