Fiber cut in SF area

Sun Apr 12 03:44:35 UTC 2009

Roger Marquis wrote:

>> Why didn't the "man in the street" pharmacy have its own backup plans?
> 
> I assume they, as most of us, believed the government was taking care of
> the country's critical infrastructure.  Interesting how well this
> illustrates the growing importance of the Internet vis-a-vis other
> communications channels.

It's also possible that they just planned on being down in such an event.

There's two factors here:

Not all low frequency risks are worth mitigating (how many of us have
generators at home).

Humans are bad at planning around rare events. Econimist Nassim Taleb's
book The Black Swan (isbn 978-1400063512) ought to be on everyones list
for coverage of the subject matter.

Fiber cuts are well outside the realm of experience for your average
business manager. The normal remediation strategy (for
telecommunications outage) in fact worked just fine, call your provider,
and or wait for them to fix it.

> Roger Marquis
> 