FOBO: the fear of being offline
“Media is under siege. Many big websites are down.” A friend of mine kept texting me with panicky messages, worrying about whether we were under some kind of cyberattack.
Even though at the time of the conversation, we had not yet had an answer as to what caused the Cloudflare outage, internet blackouts had already become routine.
For businesses, such outages mean significant downtime or disruption of services, resulting in lost revenue.
But for many of us whose livelihoods don’t depend on immediate and uninterrupted internet access, a little time off is actually a good thing.
It’s not my intention to go full Luddite on you and rant about how we’d all be better off without so much technology. I’ve literally watched a Gen‑Z friend struggling to read on the plane, likely the outcome of too many hours on the phone.
But it’s nice to be out of range sometimes. Or, at least, to pretend to be. However, that is a privilege that is being slowly taken away from us because, as we are so technologically advanced, we can’t even have those few hours of peace in the skies.
Like my colleague Neil Hughes, I recently boarded an Air Baltic plane with free Starlink internet. And the connection was so good that I saw people around me participating in Zoom meetings, writing emails, and constantly texting their loved ones.
In focus: Cloudflare, AWS, Azure outages
Cloudflare CEO issues apology as the worst service disruption since 2019 affects everyone, from major banks to mom-and-pop businesses
As Cloudflare fully recovered from an hours-long outage on Tuesday impacting millions, the company assured customers in its post-mortem that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack or malicious activity.
AWS outage affects everything from Signal to Snapchat
Issues affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS) have caused massive outages affecting a multitude of services, including Signal, Snapchat, Amazon, Ring, and many others.
Microsoft Azure, 365 Copilot outage blamed on configuration error, impacting thousands of users
The Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform and the Microsoft 365 Copilot productivity software suite were down for thousands of users in October, with the tech giant reporting that a configuration error was to blame.
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