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Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

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Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#71

Post by eip »

The outage in SF shutdown the company I work at for most of the day. I work remote so was unaffected but everyone else ended up being unable to work.

This was an outage of one substation for less than 12 hours. Now imagine an 8.0+ earthquake anywhere in the bay area. The whole city could be shutdown for prolonged periods.

You don't put all your servers in one datacenter so why would you put all of your employees in one building? I am not sure why companies don't encourage at least 50% of their employees to be remote. Seems like basic DR planning to me.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#72

Post by pps43 »

yequalsx wrote: post #70
pps43 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I said "not likely" rather than "impossible". It's just conservative Bayesian prior. Remember last time nefarious hackers infecting computers at power plants were in the news, that later turned out to be antivirus finding some spam on completely unrelated computer?

It's hard to imagine you really understand Bayesian statistics when you mention what happened the last time as support for your point. It is quite hard to believe that you know with reasonable degree of accuracy the probabilities involved.

Ok I'll bite. Let's back of the envelope the probability.

In the past 17 years I experienced 5 blackouts, so return period is about 1,241 days. Among the cities that were mentioned, San Francisco is the smallest, with population about 865,000. Let's look at all US cities with population above 500,000. There are 34 of those.

The probability of having simultaneous blackout in 3 of 34 cities during 1,241 days is 1-exp(-C(34,3)/1241^2)=0.4%, or about 2% for the same 17 year period.

The above calculation assumes independence, but in reality probability is much higher because independence assumption rarely holds in real life. For example, we already observed multiple large cities in the Northeast having simultaneous blackouts in 2003.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#74

Post by sandGorgon »

Interestingly, in India this would have close to zero impact. Because of the rate of industrial growth combined with a massive shortfall of energy - almost everyone in urban India has private diesel-fueled electrical generators (yes - including individual homes and small startups).

Plus as a cultural thing, Indians have designed power failure into their daily lives. Interestingly trivia - the most popular Nokia phone in India was the one that had a dedicated torch.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#75

Post by zachlatta »

eip wrote: post #71

The outage in SF shutdown the company I work at for most of the day. I work remote so was unaffected but everyone else ended up being unable to work. This was an outage of one substation for less than 12 hours. Now imagine an 8.0+ earthquake anywhere in the bay area. The whole city could be shutdown for prolonged periods. You don't put all your servers in one datacenter so why would you put all of your employees in o…

Risk.

Re: Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco

#76

Post by Zaak »

hendzen wrote: post #73
Zaak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

North Korea doesn't exactly have a large pool of technically skilled people available.

What makes you think that?

It's a country where only top level officials have access to the internet, most places don't have working electricity, and there's virtually no interaction with the rest of the world.
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