You know, it would be cool if you found stats on the downtime metrics of these various high-profile recent outages, and calculated the odds of having such a cluster. Statistics is hard, though, and avoiding a "Texas Bulls-eye" would be hard.
This thread is linked to a status page run by Twitter, on a programming and technology news site. I'm not really seeing how most people that exist in the western/1st world are noticing this. Is there a CNN article, or FoxNews segment on how tech companies are having outages?
quote from that url: "The outage came as President Trump was hosting a social media summit with right-wing personalities and tech industry critics who've accused Twitter and other websites of having an anti-conservative bias."
What you say could be true, but I don't know that we can assume it. If downtime requires several things to happen (cascading errors), but those things interact somehow (problem with one makes another more likely), I could imagine it might not be normally distributed. Disclaimer: I Am Not A Statistician.
The logic of the GP still applies though. Sites have outages every day so it is inevitable that some large sites will fail around the same time. Also, we know that Cloudflare and Twitter outages were attributed to configuration changes, probably others have benign explanations as well.
Sure, but "configuration changes" does not exclude several of these options. For example, is it harder to predict/deal with the consequences of configuration changes than it used to be?
