If companies like Amazon and Google are going to outright lie on their status pages, why bother having them at all?
*"The site is up, I just can't get to it. Fix my network!"
Presumably there is some internal threshold for when to flick the switch on the service dashboard, but without knowing anything about the scale of the outage or what the threshold is we're kinda shooting in the dark.
Perhaps it would help if the dashboards gave a tiny inkling of transparency, like what the thresholds are so you could gauge the relative significance of your personal service outage. If my page is out and vendor shows green, then maybe those relying on my service ontop of vendor won't believe me as much when I pass blame to them and/or maybe the vendor isn't even aware of the issue, so I should contact them because I'm an edge case.
If my service is out and the status page shows red with a nifty "were working on it" I can very clearly show anyone I report to or who is dependent on my service the parent service outage causing the issue, maybe even link them to it. In addition, I know that I don't need to contact the vendors support because they're aware of the issue and actively working on resolving it. I'm sure their support staff will appreciate it that millions of people can avoid contacting their support service reporting the same outage and having to repeat the same information through more costly reporting mechanisms than a page everyone can simply observe.
Every power company I've been with for at least the past 10 years basically do this. If I'm out at work and come home to no power, I first load my power company's outage report site (service status dashboard). I check my area and magically I know if the power company is aware and likely working on it, I can even see their updated time estimates when service will be restored. Sometimes they even tell me what caused the issue (oh boy, information). I never even have to make a call.
Meanwhile if I'm sitting here sipping coffee and hear a loud noise down the street, power is out in the middle of the day and I look across the street and see the neighbor's interior lights on, check the power company's outage map and don't see it: I give them a call. Tada, I know my isolated outage will be addressed and the service provider is aware of the issue. I also know if it looks limited, I'm probably going to be a lower priority if there are multiple outages and limited maintenance staff, so I can sort of expect it may be several hours. I can head out and not waste my time and effort sitting around.
Let's treat critical internet service infrastructure (that's what 'cloud' wanted to be, so let them have all that entails) like we treat other critical service infrastructure. It works quite well.
The underlying issue I see is that my utilities are well regulated and watched over so there often is a lot of transparency about what's going on. Heck, they even have public hearings if they want to increase their prices. Meanwhile, private company offering some service isn't very regulated and has every incentive not to let you know to manage the perception of their image and reliability vs providing empirical actual data. So will we see any sort of transparency? I doubt it, just as I highly doubt the size of represntative truthfulness of any data they report.
You can still access your calendar via https://calendar.google.com/u/0/embed?mode=week
This brings back the old UI (Google Agenda times).
I'm amazed by how little that page downloads. I'm getting less than 1MB here. Gmail downloads 20MB to display my inbox.
it's genuinely so frustrating, especially because if you use the html-link and then have to log in, it sends you back to javascript gmail again. I think this might actually be the thing that'll get me to switch from gmail, which I've been too lazy to do, but meaning to do for ages now
the worst part I think is that you can't middle click to open new tabs. I don't know if it's just me, but I constantly find myself wanting to cross reference two things that require multiple tabs, and SPAs never let you open anything in a new tab (even though they could if they bothered to implement it).
There's really nothing special about SPAs that prevent opening new tabs with middle click. All they need to do is use a href element instead of, e.g., a span with a click handler. For some inexplicable reason, gmail has opted for the latter even though most click targets update the url and navigate the user somewhere.
It just seems lazy to me.
Joy.
Also, this isn't normal captchas where you can get sounds or stuff. These are completely inaccessible for many people.
Re: banks, there is also the iDEAL status page [3].
[1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/142053/storingswebsite-allestori...
Certain customer may opt-out, but by default we should do global unplug once per year.
It honestly sounds like it would be a really interesting itch to scratch - VMs with explicitly bad network, bad disk, etc. You could specify the severity and randomness of failures, or what days you want things to crash. You could even go nuts and corrupt memory, or randomly trigger GPFs or fault random instructions.
The best part is that the corruption could be cooperative, such that the initial handshakes of TLS connections always succeed, and things like database connections always establish correctly, and PID 1 never faults. So you always end up crashing somewhere obscure, infuriatingly annoying, and very interesting.
I understand that both NFS and rsync-without-SSH don't carry any form of authenticity checksum (IIUC NFS encryption does provide this if you set up Kerberos). Would be fun to corrupt random packets so they get the same TCP+IP checksum, eh...? ;)
And you could even go absolutely ballistic and borrow techniques from fuzzers like AFL to observe and trace long-running executions, and compute ways to trip a program up to get maximally divergent results. I wonder if you could build an inference model for that...
Yeah, this sounds unreasonably fun.
Outage should take a minimum of 8 hours
We need to move away from these big companies NOW!
Get your own HTTP, DNS and SMTP server (in that order), your own domains, host at home with fiber and lead-acid backup!
Make your ISPs enable static IP and open DNS + SMTP ports.
My old Android phone has gotten into a very sorry state, I badly need to factory reset it to fix it (eh, and maybe root it while I'm at it) once I get some data off of it - but the other day my bank app happened to be crashing, and I was able to determine it was because Chrome's WebView hadn't updated correctly. So (the Play Store has completely wedged itself and the app has disappeared, seemingly a catastrophically failed update) I grabbed an updated WebView APK from Ze Internetz, and yay, fixed.
Although yeah, I can't really recommend that particular strategy as a particularly secure first-class solution...
But watching logcat can be very useful. And you can at least wave the log info above your head like an annoying "I did my due dilligence" flag :P
> expensive paperweight
Imagine if the expensive paperweight stops working as the mandatory 2FA.
> 10:40 AM UTC The problem with Google Calendar has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support.
> Incident began at 2021-12-08 08:40 and ended at 2021-12-08 10:20 (times are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)).
I can imagine it now, workers eagerly awaiting the radio announcements over breakfast: "The following regions have Google datacenter outages..."
But I'm getting 500 anyway ;)
Interestingly, it asked me to fill a captca test. Could it be an attack?
If you have 500 meetings in Gcal on anything but a multi-year view, you may want to consider a new job.
companies die once their legal dept. ends up in charge of everything. at G this happened around 2010.
