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Re:GitHub degraded performance – resolved by bob1029 on Thursday October 21, 2021 @05:41PM (#28951158)
> I shudder to think how much of the world economy would grind to a halt if Amazon or another significant cloud provider had a sustained, multi-region outage (say 24-48 hours).

You can rest at ease. Nothing that is mission-critical for the world's financial infrastructure is hosted within one of these sorts of facilities. Facebook and Netflix might go down for days, but your Amex will still work at any merchant with a functioning internet connection.

I have been inside of [financial services organization]'s datacenter in [some midwestern state] which was purpose-built for the IT load. The strategy is "failure is not an option". It's essentially 1 gigantic, redundant life-support system for the one of the more sensitive computers on the planet. Amazon and Microsoft cannot afford to go to these lengths for the market they serve.

Re:GitHub degraded performance – resolved by ygjb on Thursday October 21, 2021 @06:07PM (#28951406)
I wish I had your confidence in the financial system, but it's not the financial services I am concerned about.

Financial services are important for moving money around, and processing electronic payments, but it doesn't matter how effectively you can process a wire if there are significant supply chain disruptions, and systems failures that take down the platforms that major retailers and distributors use for logistics.

Even if ATMs and bank networks remain up, what about the encashment and physical security services that those institutions rely on to move around actual physical money?

The economy is more than just financial services, and all of those financial services are just proxies for the real world goods that people need to survive for more than a few days in most urban centres.