yeah, the internet is working perfectly. if you want to view 503 errors.

Believe it or not but "the internet" and "the world wide web" are not synonyms.

True. But the vast majority of use goes via "WWW".

For example email - the other big "internet-user" is technically not part of the WWW, but most (? I don't have any stats, just a guess) of our mailclients run on the WWW, nonetheless.

I think that's the point the other person was making: The Internet is still fine, regardless of whether or not the content gets delivered.

There are roads (or shall I say tubes?). There are cars and busses on the road. Over time, almost everyone has migrated to just a few bus companies. One of them suffers a complete collapse for a few hours. Yes, this means chaos when it comes to transporting people. But the roads are just fine.

This doesn't mean that the situation is fine and that people aren't affected. But it would be entirely different if the roads had been washed away or something.

BitTorrent was half of all Internet traffic for a while, though it has decreased with the rise of legal and convenient streaming services.

Most of which (unfortunately) run on the WWW.

I'm not sure what the native clients for Netflix and Spotify actually run, but I use their WWW clients mostly. Making most of my internet bits&bytes go over the WWW.

Thank god network people haven't drunk the centralization kool-aid.

It’s the equivalent to JIT manufacturing. Cheaper when everything is going fine, and devastating when it’s not. And then when everything goes down at once there’s not enough advantage to being the only one still up.

about that...

Interestingly, server side rendered pages worked well during the outage. Most of the issues were caused by sites that are relying too much on Javascript.

Yes, my personal project was working fine all the time. Only I couldn't access the Stripe payment system dashboard

And only those websites on some networks. If I connect my phone to my cell network instead of wifi, the problem sites work for me.