What the 'Summer of Outages' showed us, and what we can do about it

Summer 2019 was a rough one for the internet, with systemic outages occurring frequently and in quick succession. Some of these outages were caused by internal errors, others external, but two overriding causes emerged: greater network complexity and the frequency and pace of code change. In aggregate, these outages serve as a painful reminder of just how fragile the internet is, especially as networks and services grow increasingly interconnected and co-reliant. The main outages were: On June 2, Google experienced outages which the company blamed on "high levels of network congestion in the eastern US" . Several of its most… [Continue Reading]