[john37386]

It seems a bit long to fix!

They probably paint themselves in a corner just like facebook few weeks ago.

This make me think;

Could it be that one day the internet will have a total global outage and it will take few days to recover?

[rossdavidh]

If we have a total global outage, Stack Overflow will be unavailable, and the internet will never be fixed. :) Mostly joking, I hope...

[jaywalk]

Some brave soul at Stack Overflow will have to physically go into the datacenter, roll up a cart with a keyboard, monitor and printer and start printing off a bunch of Networking answers.

[lesam]

The StackOverflow datacenter is famously tiny - like, 10 Windows servers. So even if the rest of the internet goes down hopefully they stay up. They might have to rebuild the internet out from their server room though.

[orhmeh09]

Large portions of stackoverflow are archived and available for download with the Kiwix app (typically used for offline Wikipedia). Same with the arch wiki. Might keep it around for a rainy day.

[iso1210]

I'm not sure how you get a total global outage in a distributed system. Lets say a major transit provider (Century link for example) advertises traffic as a "go via me", but then drops the traffic, lets also assume it drops the costs of routes to pretty much zero. That would certainly have a major effect, until their customers/peers stop their peers.

That might be tricky if they are remote and not on the same AS as their router access points and have no completely out of band access, but you're still talking hours at most.

[ericskiff]

This actually happened back in 2012 or so. Major AWS outage that took down big services all over the place, took a few days for some services to come fully back online. https://aws.amazon.com/message/680342/

[devenvdev]

The only possible scenario I could come up with is someone crashing internet on purpose, e.g. some crazy uncatchable trojan that starts DDOSing everything. I doubt such scenario is feasible though...