this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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xkcd #3170: Service Outage

Title text:

Now, if it were the Canon wiki, it's possible to imagine someone with a productivity-related reason for consulting it, but no one's job requires them to read that much about Admiral Daala.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3170/

explainxkcd for #3170

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[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 41 points 1 day ago (2 children)

The curve for people who depend on the service seems wrong. I would expect a sharp drop as soon as the service goes out and then gradually a partial recovery as they find other things to do.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 26 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

You can go several hours without realizing a service is down but as soon as you realize you need it then your productivity drops. If you average that over everyone then the chart seems right to me.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Also these things are often cascading failures to some extent in that it takes a short while before the bad config or release has been fully propagated.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 1 points 10 hours ago

Good point, even more so if you depend on something that depends on the original thing but have no clue about the original thing at all.

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 15 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Experienced this first hand.

I often challenge myself to not use internet for some random problems as practice.

One time, after practically an entire day working on some personal prject; I could not push my code to github. I attempted to look up if github is down on my phone and couldn't.

Turns out there was an outage in my area. I had spent whole day programming without internet and did not notice.

After finding out I just shut down my computer and went to bed early lmao.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 5 points 20 hours ago

Or it takes a while for the customer to notice so you can ignore it until then

I could see it where they have something else to do at the start, but the longer it goes on the less productive stuff there is to do not relying on the service?