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Comment by anon7000 | Hacker News Reader

I mean, going over the public internet gives you a pretty huge amount of redundancy. It’s common for individual companies to have outages, or one small neighborhood to have an issue, but has there ever been a global internet outage?

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Perhaps not completely global, but there have been some extremely widespread outages (usually from DNS or BGP misconfiguration).

- 2019: Verizon/BGP routing issue

- 2021: Verizon/FIOS routing issue

- 2021: Fastly CDN outage

- 2021: Comcast: San Francisco backbone outage

- 2021: Akamai: Edge DNS outage

- 2022: Rogers telecom routing issue

- 2023: Cloudflare: DNSSec expired certificates triggered an outage

- 2025: Cloudflare: core proxy outage

It doesn’t give you what POTS used to give you - several days of battery backup that kept the phone system working in the event of power failure. I remember the huge racks of lead-acid batteries in the old exchange buildings

The batteries were part of the trick, for sure. All of the telco gear ran on -48v, and was connected in parallel with the batteries.

In this way, grid power could come and go rapidly and the switches wouldn't even notice. There there was no handoff, or switchover time. The chemical batteries just changed from being held at a steady SoC to being discharged, which is something they can do without complaint or interruption. KISS.

After that, at least for the AT&T-built central office down the road from where I grew up, the generators would engage and keep things going indefinitely (or until fuel ceased to flow).

There was that time when .com and .net were corrupted for 4 hours, and the death of Michael Jackson crashed Twitter, AIM, and Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_outage#List

Only your neighbourhood needs to have an outage for your neighbourhood to have an outage. Nobody's saying it's okay if 911 goes down as long as it's still up for some people in the world.

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