[foresterre]

It still surprises me how much essential services like public transport are completely reliant on cloud providers, and don't seem to have backups in place.

Here in The Netherlands, almost all trains were first delayed significantly, and then cancelled for a few hours because of this, which had real impact because today is also the day we got to vote for the next parlement (I know some who can't get home in time before the polls close, and they left for work before they opened).

[conductr]

Is voting there a one day only event? If not, I feel the solution to that particular problem is quite clear. There’s a million things that could go wrong causing you to miss something when you try to do it in a narrow time range (today after work before polls close)

If it’s a multi day event, it’s probably that way for a reason. Partially the same as the solution to above.

[DontBreakAlex]

In europe, voting typically happens in one day, where everyone physically goes to their designated voting place and puts papers in a transparent box. You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to. Tom Scott has a very good video about why we don't want electronic/mail voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

[mc32]

If India can have voters vote and tally all the votes in one day, then so can everyone else. It’s the best way to avoid fraud and people going with whoever is ahead. I am sympathetic with emergency protocols for deadly pandemics, but for all else, in-person on a given day.

[klardotsh]

Washington State having full vote-by-mail (there is technically a layer of in-person voting as a fallback for those who need it for accessibility reasons or who missed the registration deadline) has spoiled me rotten, I couldn't imagine having to go back to synchronous on-site voting on a single day like I did in Illinois. Awful. Being able to fill my ballot at my leisure, at home, where I can have all the research material open, and drive it to a ballot drop box whenever is convenient in a 2-3 week window before 20:00 on election night, is a game-changer for democracy. Of course this also means that people who serve to benefit from disenfranchising voters and making it more difficult to vote, absolutely hate our system and continually attack it for one reason or another.

[j45]

Organizations who had their own datacenters were chided for being resistant to modernizing, and now they modernized to use someone else's shared computers and they stopped working.

I really do feel the only viable future for clouds is hybrid or agnostic clouds.

[esseph]

Hybrid was always the way. Use different tools to solve different problems.

[Mr_Minderbinder]

Finance is increasingly reliant on it too, my bank moved their entire system to AWS. The amount of power being handed over to these cloud companies in exchange for “convenience” is astonishing.

[hinkley]

Voting days should be a national holiday.

[tmtvl]

Here in Belgium voting is usually done during the weekend, although it shouldn't matter because voting is a civic duty (unless you have a good reason you have to go vote or you'll be fined), so those who work during the weekend have a valid reason to come in late or leave early.

[hshdhdhehd]

In Australia there are so many places to vote, it is almost popping out to get milk level if convenience. Just detour your dog walk slightly. Always at the weekend.

[sleepybrett]

In washington we have a 100% mail-in voting system (for all intents and purposes). I can put my ballot back in the mail or drop at any number of drop-boxes throughout the city (less dropboxes in rural areas i'm sure). I think there are some allowances for in-person voting but I don't think they are often used.

There is a ballot tracking system as well, I can see and be notified as my ballot moves through the counting system. It's pretty cool.

I actually just got back from dropping off my local elections ballot 15m ago, quick bike trip maybe a mile or so away and back.

Of course, because it makes it easy for people to vote, the republicans want to do away with it. If you have to stand in line for several hours (which seems to be very normal in most cities) and potentially miss work to do it that's going to all but guarantee that working people and the less motivated will not vote.

So yes in places that only do in person voting, national or state holiday.

[Archelaos]

In Germany it is always a Sunday.

[hshdhdhehd]

In Australia there are so many places to vote, it is almost popping out to get milk level if convenience. (At least in urbia and suburbia) Just detour your dog walk slightly. Always at the weekend.

[stefs]

i'm not sure this is an easily solvable problem. i remember reading an article arguing that your cloud provider is part of your tech stack and it's close to impossible/a huge PITA to make a non-trivial service provider-agnostic. they'd have to run their own openstack in different datacenters, which would be costly and have their own points of failure.

[dotancohen]

I run non trivial services on EC2, using that service as a VPS. My deploy script works just as well on provisioned Digital Ocean services and on docker containers using docker-compose.

I do need a human to provision a few servers and configure e.g. load balancing and when to spin up additional servers under load. But that is far less of a PITA than having my systems tied to a specific provider or down whenever a cloud precipitates.

[myself248]

How ever did buses run before The Cloud™? What a weird world that must have been.

[fHr]

can't believe it's 2025 and some still need to go to some place to vote. I can vote since I can remember(at least 20 years) by mail for anything, we also vote multiple times a year(4-6 times), we just get 1 Month before the things to vote by mail and then mail in back votes. Hope we can soon vote online to get rid of the paper overhead.

[vanviegen]

When voting remotely, how can we be sure that your vote was not bought or coerced?

[qrios]

Is that you? The same guy with the comment "hahahhahaha"[1] on "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"[2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689366

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44684373

[tuukkah]

Could you provide a reference about the train disruption? I tried but couldn't find anything in English.

[foresterre]

Here is an article in English:

https://nltimes.nl/2025/10/29/ns-hit-microsoft-cloud-outage-...

It should be noted that the article isn't complete: while the travel planner and ticket machines were the first to fail, trains were cancelled soon after; it took a few hours before everything restarted.

Based on what the conductors said, I would speculate that the train drivers digital schedule was not operative, so they didn't know where to go next.

[alt227]

Wow thats crazy! National transport infrastructure being so fragile. What a great age we live in.

[onionisafruit]

It is a great age to live in where we have transportation infrastructure beyond foot paths.

[tmtvl]

The Flemish bus company (de Lijn) uses Azure and I couldn't activate my ticket when I came home after training a couple of hours ago. I should probably start using physical tickets again, because at least those work properly. It's just stupid that there's so much stuff being moved to digital only (often even only being accessible through an Android or iOS app, despite the parent companies of those two being utterly atrocious) when the physical alternatives are more reliable.

[bironran]

Yet... deploy on two clouds and you'll get tax payers scream at you for "wasting money" preparing for a black swan event. Can't have both, either reliability or lower cost.

[varispeed]

Wasn't cloud sold based on a premise to prevent the very thing that is happening? Sounds like a massive fail of the whole concept.

[barrenko]

> wouldn't put China or Russia above this

[gowld]

Why would you put Microsoft above this?

[platevoltage]

I wouldn't put Texas above this either.

[alliao]

dang even zealand didn't survive! new zealand got some soul searching with this outage which took down government person ID service, it's called RealME and it can be used to file your taxes apply for passport etc

[bethekidyouwant]

You are not getting more 9’s rolling your own

[bombcar]

You can get way more 9s if you roll your own procedures - and each step has a way of handling failure of the other steps.

Old trains had paper tickets, the locomotive was its own power source, the conductor had a flashlight, and the conductor could sell tickets for cash.

And if everything else failed, the conductor would just let you ride for free.

Now everything's so interconnected that any one part failing brings everything to a halt.

[vachina]

At least I get to control when the 0.01 happens.