The 21st century runs on, for all intents and purposes, magic—the internet. Our technology is so advanced that we can instantly send money overseas, travel across the world in a day, and talk to someone face-to-face who’s thousands of miles away without even thinking twice. A few fancy mattresses even connect to your phone.
We’ve become dependent on these services. Very few of us stop to ask, How does this all work? Until it all goes wrong.
Last week, a company you’ve probably never heard of, Cloudflare, experienced significant outages. It meant many people couldn’t access X (formerly Twitter), ChatGPT, and more.
Last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a catastrophic failure. Everything from the McDonald’s App, to Amazon itself, to Ring doorbells, to homework submission sites at Ivy League schools was affected.
What are these companies? Why did these outages happen? And what can these outages teach us…
