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Another Web Outage: Why is it always DNS? ShopTalk! episode artwork

Nov 1, 2025 37 min

Another Web Outage: Why is it always DNS? ShopTalk!

from Dave’s Garage: Shop Talk Hosted by Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges

Dave explains how DNS causes major web outages when even a small area of DNS is impacted. 00:00 - Intro 00:25 - It’s always DNS. Right, @JeffGeerling? 03:48 - Why did DNS fail to begin with? 04:20 - So how much did 18 hours cost? 05:26 - SO any company that had a complete outage did not design their services properly? 05:53 - Is it time for a governance-oriented approach that balances financial control with technical resilience? 07:15 - You really do need to trigger your failure cases 07:56 - The real question from a financial perspective did Amazon breach their SLA of 99.99% monthly uptime? 08:28 - Do you think building with multi-region or multi-cloud avoided because of the $$ or difficulty? 09:02 - How can someone claiming to be a software engineer make a stupid comment about the web being “down”? Click bait. 10:04 - How is AWS counting as the whole web? 10:25 - “…must be 24x7 uptime” How serious are you about that? 11:27 - You gave me enough information to talk to my head of IT and say , “man yesterday was rough, huh?” 11:49 - The web was down? Did I sleep through it? Didn’t notice 12:27 - I was impressed at how swiftly you put this together. Nice. 12:56 - Challenges recording “The Web is Down” episode 13:39 - What does this imply for Amazon’s ability to recover in the case of a disaster? 14:46 - DNS? Again? Haven’t they already learned that lesson? 15:09 - Did they try turning it off and back on? 15:27 - A system so centralised everything depends on a single location. What could go wrong!? 16:15 - Does no one know how to build web applications on bare metal servers anymore? 16:32 - Dave is not an Amazon apolgist… 16:56 - And this why i have a rack here in my apartment with local iot that requires no internet connection. 17:44 - Why does your teleprompter need the cloud? 18:09 - “The resiliency you don’t practice is the resiliency you don’t have.” 18:26 - Were there any success stories? 18:44 - Kinda the whole point of ARPANET was nuclear hardened comms with NO single points of failure. 20:37 - Is your identity really just your time at Microsoft? 21:19 - PBX phones and 911 - this one time Dave’s wife…. 22:12 - North Virginia? Did you mean north Virginia? 22:54 - Did you do this video in 1 shot without a script? 23:12 - is that PDP real? 23:37 - “My own PDP dutifully served their web pages” 23:49 - Why not consider OpenVMS? 25:57 - Will share your Drhystone code? 26:20 - I’d be super interested in a video about AI code generation utilizing unit testing. 26:59 - Changes to AI services that Dave pays for 27:49 - Could you make an episode for beginners on using AI to write Python code? 29:00 - What was YOUR path to a more long-term visa? Did Microsoft sponsor you? 31:12 - Would you ever take one of your antique machines to a computer show? 32:15 - Were you a MCSE on Windows NT? 32:45 - Program Tabs appear across the Task Bar also (bad). How can I get them off of the task bar while open? 33:23 - Subdural Hematoma! The Flintstones clip was based on a Ben Casey show. 35:02 - At the 39:04 mark there is a hard cut and it comes back in with you both smiling and laughing…. 35:36 - YouTube videos ending in a hard-cut 37:15 - The Friendly Coder ending

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This episode was published on November 1, 2025.

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