"Celebrities die 2.7183 at a time": http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/celebrities.html

So the only take away is that now the population at large notices tech companies outages as much as they notice celebrity deaths?

"population at large"

This thread is linked to a status page run by Twitter, on a programming and technology news site. I'm not really seeing how most people that exist in the western/1st world are noticing this. Is there a CNN article, or FoxNews segment on how tech companies are having outages?

Yes, fox news even suggest it was part of a large coordinated censorship effort on the POTUS :D

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/twitter-suffers-widespread-outa...

quote from that url: "The outage came as President Trump was hosting a social media summit with right-wing personalities and tech industry critics who've accused Twitter and other websites of having an anti-conservative bias."

Already did that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356610

Sure does look like we are way out there at the tail end of the probability distribution, by those numbers.

I mean, we can assume the downtime variance follows a normal distribution. It should pretty easy to calculate P<.05 with just a little bit of data.

What you say could be true, but I don't know that we can assume it. If downtime requires several things to happen (cascading errors), but those things interact somehow (problem with one makes another more likely), I could imagine it might not be normally distributed. Disclaimer: I Am Not A Statistician.