Actually, I started wondering the last few minutes : what if the next worldwar would start on the internet? Or is this a common assumption already?

I had not connected Huawei to my conspiracy theory yet, but just did.

People who make defense policy have been assuming the answer to that question was "yes" for about 20 years now. It's sometimes described as "cyber precedes kinetic."

https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1215.html

Ok, so unfriendly sovereign nations are trying to “hurt” us by making social media inaccessible? I’m half joking here, but perhaps we should all be out, about, and enjoying Independence Day in person rather than through our phone screens.

(Yes I realize WhatsApp is a different segment, an important way people communicate.)

All three apps are huge for communication. It doesn't seem far fetched that a nation would test its capabilities taking down different forms of communication.

Parent is referring to the holiday tomorrow in the United States.

I think GP understood quite well and wanted to express their dissatisfaction with the assumption that everyone is American.

Is there an official HN stance on this? There have been times I comment, with frustration, that a statement/positions can be hard to grok for those who don't have an automatically-American context in mind (you know, because they might not live in America) the downvotes come swiftly and snarky comments about "this is an American messageboard" follow.

So I'm actually genuinely curious what YC/HN's official position on this is. Asking broadly.

There was already a US-centric context via the parent comment:

It was a link to a RAND report warning the US Military of cyber-attacks in the US, the report starting off as: "The chances are growing that the United States will find itself in a crisis in cyberspace, with the escalation of tensions associated with a major cyberattack, suspicions that one has taken place, or fears that it might do so soon."

The comment I was replying to was literally a link to a RAND report warning of such things in the US, the reporting starting off as:

"The chances are growing that the United States will find itself in a crisis in cyberspace, with the escalation of tensions associated with a major cyberattack, suspicions that one has taken place, or fears that it might do so soon."

If that's the case, then they should have make that critique directly rather than beat around it with questions that they didn't actually need answered.

Thank you. So we are basically waiting for a Twitter outage.

If Dropbox goes down, then something serious may be going on.

I think Twitter DMs are having issues too...

You might love Neal Stephenson's latest book "Fall, or Dodge In Hell"

It's not quite about a world war on the Internet, but it is about what could happen if the Internet suddenly stops working somewhere.

Nitpick, but it's:

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

People would start by attacking telecoms much like they used to start with rail and harbours.

If I'm not mistaken virtually all of the ones in the list above were caused by networking problems. Given how much Chinese parts are in those interfaces, it does make you wonder.

It could also be just a really strange coincidence.

So, people like to slam on GCP but not Azure. Didn’t make front page of HN but GCP wasn’t even an outage just increased latencies due to rerouting and still make front HN?