Why would you assume this and judge the company on it, based entirely on an offhanded comment? You couldnt have given them the benefit of the doubt long enough to find another of several comments which clearly indicate there was a team of people working on the issue?

The question remains how many people actually are monitoring the network in order to call the first responders. Is it one person, two or five?

And my use of "not impressive" was in reply to someone who said "impressive" but more importantly thought it was "impressive" that they put up a post mortem within hours. That's nice but it doesn't answer the question that I had.

I stand behind my comment and re ask the question (since the info is ambiguous we have jgramhmc saying "small team who monitor things" and we have the blog post saying "Someone from our operations team is monitoring our network 24/7."

I don't think it's unreasonable (in the interest of transparency) to know exactly the structure and # bodies of who monitors the network at any given time. What is the human point of failure in the system?

I don't depend on cloudflare. But if I was running a mission critical operation and depended on them I might setup a site visit to actually get a feel of what is going on.

As an aside back when the .org registry got started one of the dns servers sat in an open unguarded office under a desk accessible by the cleaning person. I saw it when I did a site visit. And of course if you've been around long enough you know there was a time when the root dns servers sat unguarded in university offices.

You seem to be looking for "problems" where non exist. There could be 15000000 people monitoring it. It can still go down.

This.

It seems that you care more about how many people are actively waiting for something to break vs. how long their response takes. Also, (those people | that person) probably (is | are) the first responder. I really believe that one "first mate" watching the automated ship sail at night ready to triage a technical problem is better than 10 guards who will promptly fall all over themselves when the bits hit the fan.

That is a little harsh. What makes you think it's only one person monitoring the entire network? And even if it is, what's the problem with that as long as they do their job correctly?

It's not usually necessary to have more than one person working overnight shifts with good automated monitoring in place. That person is tasked with "watching the watchman" as it were.

Paying 5 people to be up all night staring at dashboards isn't generally (required|a good use of people).

It's not an issue of whether they can get backup or not.

(And I don't agree with that anyway a night guard can call 911 and get the police pretty quick.)

The issue is whether there is a single person monitoring the network or several or even two. And is the coverage different during "working" hours? And what about the skills of the person monitoring at 1am vs. during the day?

Seems that after something happens people wise up to the weak points. Remembering the case of a single air traffic controller in some towers and after something went wrong there was such shock that only one person was on duty with no backup.

You're being That Guy.