“Photoshopping the then-missing princess of Wales. The press twisting Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” comment out of context. AT&T Wireless down for hours. And (gasp!) Instagram offline. Is anything reliable anymore?
Reliability is a lost art. Our electricity used to be so steady that plugged-in wall clocks rarely needed adjusting. That’s funny now because power outages are so commonplace. Heck, we now schedule rolling blackouts in California—forced failure.
Back then, the electric grid and phone system were designed for “five 9s” or 99.999% reliability—five minutes of unscheduled downtime a year. Last month, AT&T. ’s cellular network went down for around 11 hours. No TikTok? The horror. AT&T provided $5 credits to customers. Thanks for nothing. Today’s reality is that we’re preconditioned to accept failure.
When did things change? My guess is after the July 13-14, 1977, New York City blackout, which happened during a heat wave. The result was fires, looting and fear that the “Son of Sam” serial killer would kill again. After that, we became thankful for outages lasting only an hour.”