im surprised the aws outage hasn't been bigger news today https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...
Discord Incident – Resolved
21–30 of 64 posts
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean all the AI "slop" that's finding and writing new kernel exploits every day? And submitting hundreds of previously-unknown security bugs in critical software?
llms aren't doing any of that. Some smart people are using llms find those vulns, there's a huge difference.
Your definition of "do" seems different than mine.
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#23im surprised the aws outage hasn't been bigger news today https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...
I'm getting Access Denied - You don't have permission to access "http://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandue..." on this server. (with an Edgesuite error code)
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
There would have been a server split, and half of the people would be chatting among themselves wondering why the some people suddenly got disconnected, while being unaware that there might be a server problem because they can still continue to chat. The other half of the people would think the same.
Don't forget everyone flooding both halves with "z0mg net split!" :P
> "z0mg net split!" :P
The 00's were an interesting time in internet culture.
Internet slang like this disappeared almost completely once the whole world got access and platforms rooted out all the weird and niche communities.
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
There would have been a server split, and half of the people would be chatting among themselves wondering why the some people suddenly got disconnected, while being unaware that there might be a server problem because they can still continue to chat. The other half of the people would think the same.
Don't forget everyone flooding both halves with "z0mg net split!" :P
Netsplits were fun. Especially if you were on the splitting part. You could get to know new people you got stuck with.
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#26Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.
I mean, when freenode would go down it was more or less the same thing, no?
Not remotely.
IRC is distributed and federated. Not only are there countless networks, each network has countless servers, and each group of servers that are up and can see each other can operate on their own, all the way down to a single server, or up to any subset up to all.
When a peering connection goes down and the network splits, maybe some people in the group disappear, or maybe from your point of view everyone else disappears.
Maybe the remaining subset of other users is already good enough because it's enough to continue what you were tallking about and who you were talking with, or if not, you have the option to just try some other servers until you find where everyone alse is. Were "server" is an actual seperate instance of the server software operated by an independant person, hosted on whatever kind of hardware or vm they set up, connected to whatever network they are on, not what Discord calls a "server".
Even if the entire group of say freenode servers goes down somehow (even though that's not really possible) there is still undernet and 400 other nets. Even without prior coordination it would be essentially trivial for the users to all just go looking for, or create on the spot, the same channel on some other net, and basically everyone finds each other again almost effortlessly. And that's if something unbelievable actually happens, let alone the normal minor breaks that actually happen once in a while.
This is entirely different from being wholly at the mercy of the single entity Discord.
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#27Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.
I feel like I have different memories about the instability of Internet services in the past than some people do. Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.
The difference was it wasn't one global server for everyone. I think that's why the past feels like it was more stable.
Now, aws or cloudflare gets a hickup and half the internet is nuked.
The old internet was far more federated so doing something else meant to me "Welp, anandtech is down, let's go to pcper, digg, tomshardware, slashdot, etc"
Sure stuff would go down, but it would be just that small community rather than most of chat for the internet.
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#28im surprised the aws outage hasn't been bigger news today https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...
It was one AZ. Kinda surprised those guys are built in a way where a single AZ failure takes them down.
AWS makes it annoying to be resilient as AZs aren't transparent to their users, so I'm more surprised some were prepared for it.
It seems to me these day people are OK with AWS going down and just blaming it on AWS rather than on themselves for not being prepared for big outages.
"Oh, nothing we can do because AWS/Cloudflare is down"
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#29Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.
I feel like I have different memories about the instability of Internet services in the past than some people do. Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.
I never seen long-running problems in big server-federations like DALNet. Our local "big" IRC servers were generally down for 10 minutes at most. They were not empty either.
Simple services recover faster. Federated infrastructure is much more resilient. We had slower computers, more considerate coders, and simpler software; so everything was snappier, even with 56K modems.
For example, navigate to https://git.sr.ht/~bayindirh/. No scripts, pure HTML. running on a single server. Served instantly.
This is possible. We, as in the world, just ignore it for shinier stones.
Now, a small VPS in an AWS server lapses for 5 seconds, and half of internet is toast. Centralization for the PWN!
Re: Discord Incident – Resolved
#30Times like this make me miss the IRC days, I was just able to reproduce a bug in an semi-open-source project, and Discord went down right in the middle of me sending my findings. Now there's nothing I can do about it. I can only wait.
I feel like I have different memories about the instability of Internet services in the past than some people do. Common IRC servers were not without problems. I think it was just more common to shrug it off and do something else until the problems went away.
Yeah, netsplits were really common; nickserv and/or chanserv not working for long periods making popular channels a hell without ops.
I think the centralisation is the issue, I could connect to a different IRC network with a community around the same topic/game. When Discord is down there's nowhere else to go.