Reel · Chaos & Reliability · Oct 17, 2026
Cool tech. Terrible failover.
In short
Everyone's asking how fast it flies; nobody's asking what happens when it fails. Last October, one empty DNS record took down AWS's biggest region for about fifteen hours (11:48 PM to 2:20 PM PDT per AWS's post-event summary). And a TV show lost its whole finished season because the backup didn't work (TV4, reported by Futurism, Oct 14). Cool is a launch. Reliable is what happens on the bad day.
Label from the original post: Flying car drawn by me, not a real product. My own voice.
Checklist: what to do about it
- For your newest feature, write down what happens when its most important dependency fails.
- Restore one backup end to end this month. A backup you haven't restored is a hope.
- Check your DNS: TTLs, health checks, and what happens if a record is empty.
- Run one failover drill with a stop button and a stopwatch.
- Fix the top three surprises, then repeat the drill.
Sources
TV4 story: reported by Futurism, Oct 14.