Oh, look at that! Another major online outage that means you can't book travel, find a date,
or order that refill of toilet paper you so desperately need, seriously send help. If it
seems to you like many of the sites you depend on are going down more frequently, you're definitely
not alone. But it's not like Facebook and Amazon are running on Windows Vista, so why the heck do
these multi-billion dollar services seem so unreliable? It might be easy to blame some of the
high-profile outages we've seen over the past few years on the COVID pandemic due to the huge
amount of load placed on cloud servers from folks working from home or otherwise staying in. I mean,
it's a lot of Zoom calls. But while stay-at-home orders and remote work did play a part,
critical services experiencing downtime was already becoming an all-too-frequent problem
before the pandemic. And it's still a big concern even now that much of the world is trying to get
back to normal. But like most wide-scale problems, there are many things that play. For starters,
brown-the-clock internet usage became very common very quickly. Think about the explosion in always
connected IoT devices, people leaving high-def videos playing all night so they can fall asleep to
them, and massive game and software downloads that often take place while users are in bed.
These things just weren't that common only 10 years ago. But the explosion in net traffic since
then has overloaded infrastructure that was only designed to handle peak traffic during certain
hours of the day. But with all the resources that big tech has, why does this problem seem to be
getting worse instead of getting better? So the fact that big tech is so, well, big is actually
part of the issue here. Even though the internet is a pretty big place, there are actually a fairly
small number of services that help run a huge number of sites. For example, Amazon Web Services
provides backend cloud computing for everything from your Netflix recommendations to your Roomba
vacuum to your Venmo account to even your airline reservations. And of course, AWS has had numerous
outages that have made headlines with causes as diverse as server cooling failures, nasty weather,
overloaded systems, and DDoS attacks. Amazon does have redundancies built in, but even so,
the fact that one company helps support so much net traffic leaves one very obvious point of failure
for lots of services that you didn't even know were reliant on Amazon, or one of its few large
scale competitors like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. And to top it all off, your ISP is routing
much of this traffic over cable lines that haven't received upgrades to improve capacity in a very
long time, which can lead to congestion in the last mile of wiring that goes to your house.
And there isn't even enough fiber on the backend right now to keep up with projected increases in
data usage, especially as mobile carriers continue to roll out 5G. So until cloud systems become more
secure and more redundant and telecom providers build out better infrastructure, I would not
count on 100% uptime. But the good news is that these outages give you an excuse to stop mindlessly
scrolling through your phone and go touch some grass. Thanks for watching guys. If you liked this
video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comment section with your ideas of topics that
we should cover in the future.