Outage Dominoes

Outage Dominoes

Yesterday someone mentioned their surprise when GitHub was offline. They said last year it was a major AWS outage, now GitHub, what’s next? npm?

According to stackshare.io, npm is backed by AWS EC2 instances. So it’s likely if there’s another major AWS outage, there will also be an npm outage.

As tech stacks increasingly rely on components from different SaaS or IaaS providers that are outside their control, we’re going to see more outage dominoes. When the entire management chain is standing behind you saying “fix it fix it fix it”, opening a support ticket and waiting isn’t nearly as satisfying or hero-creating as being able to jump in and fix the actual problem.