This time it wasn’t the thing from Nebraska.
The messed up thing about this is that the original image was talking about some random project being maintained by one person in their spare time. This is about a $69 billion company
Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.
$69 billion
Nice.
The other leg is AWS. If both go down, it’s stone knives and bearskins.
*edit: somebody beat me to it
I am good, I am self hosting plenty of entertainment!
1 minute later
AWS outage took down Tailscale, I have nothing.
Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.
Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.
What happened this time that I’m learning about here?
Cloudflare had a global outage this morning
Some Lemmy instances were also down because of it.
Edit: At least that was the case for me.
Why on earth would an org the size of X be using Cloudflare?
X is pretty small.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.
As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.
If I had to guess I’d assume that it’s cheaper than doing it in-house. And considering that Musk fired the vast majority of Twitter’s most talented staff when he took over it’s probably also more reliable, even with today’s outage on the record.
That’s a good one ☝️
