Not that I noticed. And yet, the outage apparently affected 10.2 million blogs, depriving them of an estimated 5.5 million pageviews, give or take. WordPress notified me about it later, linking through to this very concise and forthright explanation on their own blog. Long story short, the disruption came “when an unscheduled change to a core router by one of our datacenter providers…broke the site. It also broke all the mechanisms for failover between our locations in San Antonio and Chicago…”
Admittedly, I’m not a tech geek, so I read that twice. I don’t know a core router from a flux capacitator and I had no idea you even needed mechanisms for failover, let alone which aisle at RadioShack you’d find them in.
As a culture, we are growing increasingly web dependent. Like so many everyday objects in our modern world–cell phones, televisions, fuel injection engines–the technology that drives them may as well be elfen magic. The language of silicone chips and circuit boards remains largely curious and hidden to the ordinary eye. When confronted with any tool more complicated than a hammer, I am powerless in any role aside from user, and that’s a decidedly disadvantageous position to hold.
Which is why this Spring, I’m planting a garden. Everyone needs something to fall back on…