Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, called the service’s recent attacks a sign of its significance in a PBS interview that airs Thursday.
“You are not a target until you become popular,” he said, after PBS’s Tavis Smiley commented that the denial-of-service attacks were a “backhanded compliment.”
There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.
“MobileMe members may be unable to access MobileMe Mail. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
If by “may” Apple means “definitely,” and by “ASAP” it means “nearly three hours and counting,” then I think we’re all on the same page.
Today, Google’s Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can’t access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again).
On Friday, a massive outage occurred at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave of negativity and criticism in the blogosphere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world’s largest hosting companies, experienced an outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes us mad. It makes us say things like: Well, maybe we shouldn’t be using the cloud.
Imagine, if you will, a world with no Internet. No email. No e-commerce. And no BlackBerrys. Email would be supplanted by snail mail; cellphones by landlines. Now imagine what the future would look like. Futurists say virtual business services of all sorts, accounting, payroll and even sales would come to a halt, as would many companies. This immediately made me think of E. M. Forster’s disturbing tale ” The Machine Stops.” Written in 1909, it describes the downfall of a civilization that had wrapped itself in the cocoon of an automated life-support system. But people began to think of the Machine as an infallible deity, and lived in their individual mechanical wombs, communicating and doing business only through the Machine.
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