this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
379 points (99.0% liked)

xkcd

13818 readers
43 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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:

Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com

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

explainxkcd for #3170

top 10 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 45 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 30 points 1 day 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.

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day 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 1 day 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.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 day 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?

[–] s@piefed.world 1 points 21 hours ago
[–] SteveNashFan@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

Now I've got to play Thrawn's Revenge again...

[–] bookmeat@lemmynsfw.com 3 points 1 day ago

The shape of that lower line seems wrong.