Back to Home10/20/2025, 9:30:35 PM

The internet just had another major global outage. Why does this keep happening?

billybuckwheat
12 points
5 comments

Mood

thoughtful

Sentiment

negative

Category

tech

Key topics

internet outage

global connectivity

network reliability

Debate intensity20/100

The internet experienced another major global outage, sparking discussions about the causes and consequences of such events, as well as the need for improved infrastructure and resilience.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Light discussion

First comment

27m

Peak period

5

Day 1

Avg / period

5

Comment distribution5 data points

Based on 5 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    10/20/2025, 9:30:35 PM

    29d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    10/20/2025, 9:57:09 PM

    27m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    5 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    10/21/2025, 8:06:38 AM

    29d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (5 comments)
Showing 5 comments
hdgvhicv
29d ago
1 reply
All eggs in one basket. The same basket. Because of groupthink.

Throw in penny pinching and cost cutting and you run on the edge. Nobody gets a bonus for spending money on backup systems. Nobody gets fired for buying ibm.

SOLAR_FIELDS
29d ago
1 reply
Part of this is also naïveté of people spinning up systems in AWS us-east-1. Any SRE or operator will tell you to never spin up systems in there unless you have a requirement to do so. It’s long been a tribal knowledge of the instability. This outage is more widespread than others but I see region level outages, at least partial ones, happen there every 1-2 years on average
hdgvhicv
29d ago
Our file deliveries to from s3 failed because despite being eu-west-1/2 authentication relied on us-east-1

From what understand that’s a feature you can’t opt out of.

AWS is a single on if failure. The same point used globally by an industry that can’t imagine any other way.

Diversity is defence. Monoculture is a strategic weakness.

karmakaze
29d ago
Funny, a telephone book is a good analogy--but some would need that explained.

> DNS is like an internet location engine, converting user-friendly web addresses like amazon.com into IP addresses - a series of numbers that other websites and applications can understand.

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ID: 45649630Type: storyLast synced: 11/19/2025, 1:54:15 PM

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