Wait, why wouldn’t we have these problems? Back in the 1980s, if a university campus connection goes down, you can’t telnet in or read your university POP2 email remotely. It’s down.

The only difference between then and now is that we’re online (seemingly) at every waking minute expecting a hundred different services to be functional at any given moment.

Modern services such as reddit and Twitter effectively usurp the role that Usenet/NNTP and similar distributed protocols used to fulfill, but without the advantage of decentralization / lack of large single points of failure that such protocols embraced. That's what I was getting at, and maybe I'm full of shit.

In the 80s if a university campus internet connection went down, only that university was affected. Now, when a single AWS availability zone goes down, a much wider swath of users is impacted. Such consolidation / centralization shows a disregard for the spirit of the early internet and design considerations that went into it.

Again, maybe I'm full of shit. Lots of people here seem to think so.