@neil I think safety in numbers is under-appreciated, both for backside-covering and also people aren't going to assume you've been hacked if everyone else is down, whereas they will if you're the only one (and it's pretty difficult to prove that you've *not* been hacked).

@neil I've seen this happen a few times, to the point I wonder if there's some kind of statistical law: that beyond a certain point, you run out of ability to reduce risk on average. After that, you can only shape whether you have a high rate of low-impact issues, or a low rate of high-impact issues.

And it does seem that way too much of the time, people just see "low rate of issues" and push for that, eventually leading to massive correlated failures

@neil The average availability of most of these services is likely still much higher than they'd be able to manage on their own.

@neil It's the business model that says "let's bet the house on the internet", but then outsource and consolidate infrastructure because I can get rid of staff and don't have to buy hardware or run a data centre.

Then be surprised when some third party bit breaks and all trading stops.

@neil I said the same thing (about "safety in numbers") when CrowdStrike shattered Windows last year, so I'm glad someone else made the same observation🙂

I'm not judging anyone for not self-hosting. Self-hosting is not a panacea.

It would be a pain if both our primary and backup Internet connections went down, or there was a problem at A&A's end. If A&A ceased, I'd be rather stuck.

Everything would stop running if we have a power outage which outlasts my UPSs, before I could rush and start the generator.

If our home blew up, or burglars decided that the best thing to take was a massive locked rack full of aged cheap computers, it would cause me a problem while I reinstated things.

All of these are possibilities, and I do what I can to mitigate against them.

But at least it would just be *my* things.

@neil I think I agree, although I would argue that part of the point of reliability is to be up when others are not, though...