[dqv]

>That's why you didn't hear about the great email collapse of 2006.

Wait, is this a joke or was there really a great email collapse in 2006?

[dsr_]

No, but Microsoft experienced one today. http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/7/14841258/microsoft-account-...

[flyingramen]

A few people lost all their emails on Gmail in 2006. https://techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-...

There have been other Gmail outages in the past though. My two favorites are:

1. The multi-hour outage in 2009 http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/01/gmail.outage/index.html?e.... 2. And one where they had to restore data from magnetic tape backups https://gmail.googleblog.com/2011/02/gmail-back-soon-for-eve....

Of course, there are other email providers too and their own outages. But I like Gmail and that's what I follow.

[astrodust]

There's been occasions where due to a massive routing snafu the whole internet became unusable. Sprint once botched their backbone so badly it started blackholing all traffic, and on another occasion tons of major routes were inexplicably shifted to China.

The top-level routing is held together with duct tape and lots of carefully trained eyes looking for problems with it.

[nilved]

It was a joke