Dave Diagnoses the Internet

Thursday, October 23, 2025

Dave Diagnoses the Internet

Dave Plummer explains how the internet broke down a few days ago.

The breakdown was one of those events where I remember exactly where I was when it happened. Not because it was especially traumatic, but because it became a nuisance, even though the scope of the problem wasn’t apparent at the time. I was working on pasting some text into the Substack editor, but I kept getting error messages that the file wasn’t automatically saving. The error messages were a slight nuisance, but nothing more. I lost none of the data, contrary to the error messages. It wasn’t till the next day that it became clear the technical glitches were part of a global internet wobble.

Here’s Dave:

Now, in my own throes of paranoia about malevolent foreign actors, I would have automatically assumed they were lurking behind such a calamity. But the event was a far more mundane than that.

Just like I didn’t associate some hiccoughs on Substack with global internet breakdown, the idea that the global Axis of America-Hating Autocracies would be targeting Substack newsletter authors was farthest from my mind. After the fact, though, it’s probably fortunate for future internet resilience that this breakdown occurred to alert those tasked with keeping the system running. Maybe the event will inspire some engineering improvements to stability.

Another, similar system we don’t spend much time worrying about, but which is something of an untold modern World Wonder, is the electric grid. When you venture into the more basic explanations of how the system works, and how it remains up and running, you can easily walk away amazed at its performative resilience. So many things have to go right all the time that it defies brief description here—and that’s on the engineering front alone, before one wanders into the arcane policy areas involving the “Independent System Operators”, the ISOs. Meredith Anguin’s book Shorting the Grid goes a long way to covering the engineering and policy terrain in overview.

There’s probably no comprehensive, sweeping conclusion to be drawn from all this. Except maybe that if you learn about the complex systems at work keeping our modern lives humming along reliably, you might be tempted to become a doomsday prepper. When you learn how much of modern life is completely beyond your control, it could be humbling, or it might be panic-inducing.