Nobody Understands the Internet Until It Breaks

Many Americans woke up this morning to discover that some of the most popular sites on the web were down. CNN, The New York Times, Reddit—even The Atlantic—all suffered issues. Was it a coordinated cyberattack? Something to do with Amazon Web Services? No, it was because of Fastly. As NPR explained, Fastly “provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites.”  

We are living in an era of massively complex technologies, of such complexity that they verge on incomprehensible. Overcomplicated, I’ve called it. But in many cases, we are shielded from the interdependencies and components of these systems that must all work seamlessly in order to operate. Until, that is, something goes wrong. Failures expose the gaps between how we thought a technology worked and how it actually did.

There are many such stories. In 2010, for example, a water main burst in the Boston suburb of Weston, depriving a large fraction of the Boston area’s population access to drinkable water for several days. The water from the Quabbin Reservoir was no longer accessible, and the backup reservoir held the equivalent of “untreated pond water.” The city of Cambridge, though, was one of the few places in the area that got its water from a separate source, and there, the water kept running. Perhaps for the first time in their life, residents of the Boston area were forced to pay attention to the complicated systems that brought water to their homes.

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