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  • Hacker News
  • > We, ngrok, have sponsored Mac to write this post because we think it’s an underexplored perspective on the topic of reliability.

    Uh, okay. Were there any reliability perspectives gained from this 30-year-old postmortem that would help us in the modern age? After reading the article, I feel the answer is "none". Not that I'm complaining I love this era of the internet. But I fail to see any importance here.

    by stigz
  • The human perspective of the outage, and the degree to which that gets buried in a fully-monopolised hellscape.
    by dredmorbius
  • History is important and interesting to some of us. Just because it's not a direct 1:1 mapping of computer problems today doesn't make it any less intellectually stimulating to read about
    by CursedSilicon
  • It's first paragraph leaves me disappointed. It's 1996. Worries over a tech bubble are a few years away. And there are no tensions with Russia really, because Americans didn't give a damn about the first Chechen war.
    by jyounker
  • Yeah, this article was clearly written by someone too young to have any solid understanding of the time period they're attempting to describe.

    For starters, they don't seem to realize that AOL usage at the time was still very much undergoing the transition/hybrid from the earlier "online service provider" model (like Prodigy, CompuServe, etc), with much of its exclusive content only accessible by "AOL keywords" and not being web/internet-based.

    The anecdote about the AIDS patient is especially weird, since the linked post does not reference this AOL outage at all -- they explicitly call out their regional ISP, "The Loop", for being down multiple days. And the BBS they reference in another post is almost certainly a dial-up text based system.

    So this article's claim that due to this AOL outage, "perhaps that BBS post would have been bumped off the front page by the time he checked" is simply nonsense: this guy wasn't using AOL, and a dial-up BBS wouldn't be affected by an ISP outage, and forums on a dial-up BBS had no notion of a "front page" whatsoever in the first place.

    Not to mention, claiming "bell-bottoms are back in style" in 1996, what?

    by evanelias
  • In a touch of irony this blog is throwing some null error
    by nikau
  • The bit about Steve Schalchlin really affected me. The idea that someone's whole life could have been different, or much shorter, if they hadn't seen a piece of info at the right time. Gives me chills.
    by ThrowawayTestr
  • Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:

    >What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.

    https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4 https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM

    Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E

    Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks: https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3 https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3

    >Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.

    nanog on seclists was an interesting read too https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51

    Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well > Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down. Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94

    by knuckleheads
  • That's really cool! I actually did download an archive of aol-sucks while researching this, but the software I was using to look through the mbox file was kinda buggy so I gave up. I'm literally the meme of the miner guy giving up right before hitting diamonds.
    by mac-chaffee
  • Its 1996 - AOHell is loading, Aphex Twin blasts over 28.8, cordless phones hidden, a pizza is on the way…
    by dobermanz
  • more like over 88.1
    by MathMonkeyMan
  • AOHell didn't take any time to load, and no one was streaming music on 28.8.
    by devin