What the Microsoft Outage Reveals - The Atlantic

We discover the fragility of our technological infrastructure only when it’s too late. By Samuel

"...Why are we so bad at preventing these? 

Fundamentally, because our technological systems are too complicated for anyone to fully understand...

• So how can we make our systems fail less often?

We need to get to know them better. 

The best way to do this, ironically, is to break them...
Engineers can induce only so many errors. 

When something happens that they didn’t anticipate, the network breaks down. 

• So how can we expand the range of failures that systems are exposed to? 

As someone who studies complex systems, I have a few approaches...