Downtime

The thing that wiped out my blog post yesterday? Turned out to be a Telstra-wide problem with the network which has become a thing, with Telstra doing some weird thing where they provide everyone with free mobile data over Sunday as a thank you.

Said thing also wiped out access to a number of websites hosted on certain servers in the US. Those servers included the folks who host this website, and any number of small business websites across Australia.

I have never, in my life, felt sorry for tech support folk the way I felt for the folks handling yesterday’s outage. People get…irrational…when it comes to the internet. It spends so much time working, and working well, that it’s become an invisible part of our culture, quietly handling every aspect of our business and social lives. It’s easy to forget that it’s actually a complicated mess of infrastructure underneath all that, which means things that go wrong in unexpected ways are…not good.

Either way, since I could not access the blog here, I blogged over at tumblr instead. Then I spent the evening critting friend stories and drinking excessive amounts of water.