[eyjafjallajokul]

Not sure what you mean here. Would a similarly architected non-distributed system have higher levels of availability?

[xvector]

He was joking :) a buggy or poorly designed distributed system might behave more like a house of cards than independent silos

[WilliamEdward]

I think they're being sarcastic? The idea with a distributed system is if one part goes down it can still mostly function, which google have managed to fail at somehow.