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Discord Incident – Resolved

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Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#41

Post by BoredPositron »

anyfoo wrote: post #39
jstummbillig wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't exactly know what you are comparing. No popular IRC network came anywhere near what we would find acceptable in terms of reliability today. It was an absolutely (wonderful) wildfire.

Netsplits, where the entire IRC network would "split" into two (or more) effectively independent networks because some a link between two servers went down, were extremely common. I don't know if daily, or weekly, but common enough to be perceived as normal and expected in any case. In the earlier days of IRC, netsplits were sometimes used for channel takeover. If someone was on a split off part of the net where ther…

It was so much fun placing some eggdrops on servers that usually split to takeover channels.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#42

Post by BoredPositron »

Aurornis wrote: post #20
rweichler wrote: post #2

Times 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.

If there was a netsplit you just bunched together on one server. It was more decentralized and a bit more reliant in a way.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#43

Post by filoleg »

cogman10 wrote: post #27
Aurornis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, but (as a user) I would rather have one global server crash for 1-2hrs two-three times per year, as opposed to having each individual server randomly crash once a month for at least one each time.

The more I sit down and try to remember how it actually was to use internet in late 00s, the only thing that always comes up is "there is no way people today would tolerate it nearly as well as we did back then".

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#44

Post by dang »

coreylane wrote: post #10

im surprised the aws outage hasn't been bigger news today https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/08/aws-outage-data-center-fandu...

Thanks! - I've re-upped https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48058197 using the SCP mechanism (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308).

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#45

Post by dang »

uproarchat wrote: post #4

I keep second guessing whether or not to mention Uproar here out of fear we'll get roasted, because it's still got its blemishes, but here goes: https://uproar.chat We're hoping to do better than discord, hopefully you get some use from it! Backend is written in go, frontend is vanilla html/js/css, TOS and PP are readable in one breath each. edit: looks like nobody can see this unless it's vouched. I guess because of…

(It doesn't look like you've been spamming HN so I restored the comment)

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#46

Post by nubinetwork »

aroman wrote: post #34
Brian_K_White wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyon…

You're arguing against a claim I did not make. Freenode had full-network outages periodically. ddos attacks, infrastructure failures etc. and when those happened, the practical experience was the same... people waited it out. Nobody coordinated a mass migration to undernet or stood up alternative servers for a few hours. (It took much bigger issues - social/organizational/political, not technical - to catalyze the ma…

> Nobody coordinated a mass migration to undernet or stood up alternative servers for a few hours.

There was always oftc...

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#47

Post by [deleted] »

suprjami wrote: post #15
majorchord wrote: post #12

Earlier 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?

What are you saying here? An LLM helped humans do something right once therefore it's perfect to use in every other situation too?

[deleted]

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#48

Post by uproarchat »

dang wrote: post #45
uproarchat wrote: post #4

I keep second guessing whether or not to mention Uproar here out of fear we'll get roasted, because it's still got its blemishes, but here goes: https://uproar.chat We're hoping to do better than discord, hopefully you get some use from it! Backend is written in go, frontend is vanilla html/js/css, TOS and PP are readable in one breath each. edit: looks like nobody can see this unless it's vouched. I guess because of…

(It doesn't look like you've been spamming HN so I restored the comment)

Thanks Dang!

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#49

Post by uproarchat »

jeffwask wrote: post #13
coreylane wrote: post #10

im 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.

For a while there was a joke that if us-east-2 goes down it's not as big a deal because everything is down.

Re: Discord Incident – Resolved

#50

Post by baronvonsp »

dietr1ch wrote: post #28
jeffwask wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> AWS makes it annoying to be resilient as AZs aren't transparent to their users

What does transparent mean here? AWS is super clear what resources are zonal and provides tons of guidance around making things multi-AZ. AZ outages aren't exactly frequent but they're reasonably likely.

Being susceptible to AZ (or region) outages is very much an architectural decision. Or a bug that needs to be fixed (I'm sure Coinbase didn't YOLO single-AZ, they've undoubtedly learned about some edge case that needs to be fixed). Sure it may not be worth the cost/complexity for some systems but resiliency is like job one for anything in the cloud that costs money when it's down.

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