When I went to look at why Mastodon users shouldn’t worry about Meta building on the ActivityPub protocol, I couldn’t — my Mastodon.xyz account had disappeared. The problem was DNS-related (it’s always DNS, remember Facebook’s massive 2021 outage?), and after a 23-hour, 59-minute break, the server’s back online. But it shows how decentralization can cut both ways — while this problem didn’t take down all of Mastodon, it left me trying to track down whoever runs my server to find out what happened.
People seem to overreact to the loss of some convenience or extrapolate problems that are not real.
A local store being closed for a day doesn’t mean the concept is dead. One branch of a megastore having trouble doesn’t mean the whole chain sinking. Downtime is just a fact of life. Sometimes I don’t even notice that they happened.