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Originally Posted by BetterRed
It often seems to me that the more dependent we get on digital communication networks the less we get done. At least one of our big telcos or banks seems to have a major outage every week.
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I've been lucky about that. I see next to no major outages.
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A subscription TV service (a Singapore owned telco) paid FIFA for exclusive rights to broadcast the World Cup here, but they had to hand over those rights to a government funded free to air broadcaster (SBS) when their system kept falling over.
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I think I've lost count of the number of cases I've seen of servers being unable to handle the load for major offerings and dying horribly.
One that amused me years back was folks reporting on MR that the Phildelphia Free Library site was down. (I grew up in Phila., lived a few blocks from the main branch, and worked there at one point as a page.)
As it happened, the
library's site was up and running. But like most libraries, the Philadelphia library partnered with a service called Overdrive for eBooks. The library bought physical copies of paper books from publishers, and licenses for the electronic versions from Overdrive. Access the library to borrow an eBook, and your request got sent to Overdrive. Overdrive checked to see whether there was an unused license for that volume, initiated a download if so, or told you all copies were out on loan and you'd have to wait if not, as you would with a physical book.
That year, it appeared
lots of folks found eBook readers unedr their Christmas Tree, and promptly accessed the library in January to borrow eBooks. Overdrive's link couldn't handle the volume and fell over. They got the servers and bandwidth upgraded to handle the volume, but it was amusing while the problem lasted.
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Dennis