Single Points of Failure

Pushing interconnected systems to the limit increases the risk of a single point of failure becoming a cascade of catastrophic failures.

Not to be repetitive - well, a little bit repetitive - but over the past several months, I've written about single points of failure and the linchpin theory, the former noting that a single point of failure can cascade into a massive tsunami of system failures and the latter arguing there exists a single point that can bring it all down.

I’ve recounted how, several years ago, when I was in Angola having a casual conversation about how much the Internet service sucked at the hotel, I was reminded of a basic concept to consider when designing any large-scale system. This is a concept that applies in structuring production processes, machine design, computer networks and even political systems – because after all, government is a system.

Called the "single point of failure", this is most prevalent in the design of communication, data and power transmission networks.

Wikipedia describes a single point of failure as this:

"A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software application, or other industrial system."

The country of Angola is a communist/socialist state and as such all services are centralized and under government control. They experienced a SPOF several months ago in their national Internet service because they had placed all the servers and main routing structures in one area – when there was a single major issue that knocked this data center off-line, the entire country was without Internet service for a week.

The manufacturers of the once ubiquitous Blackberry, Research in Motion, had a massive, week-long outage in Europe, South America and Africa due to a faulty core switch – which strangely was designed as a failsafe system to move the data flow to a redundant backup system – so the “failsafe” failed:

"In a press briefing yesterday evening, RIM Chief Technology Officer David Yach confirmed the technical problem was down to a faulty core switch in the main Slough network operating centre, which routes BlackBerry traffic across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India and for three operators in South America.

This was a single point of failure as a failover system did not kick in to another switch at the same site. There was no way RIM could have re-routed the traffic bypassing Slough, analysts said, as it is only one of two main network operating centres RIM runs to serve the world network – the other being in Waterloo, Canada where its HQ is."

Why is this germane?

It is relevant because the users of the Internet in Angola and the Blackberry users in affected eastern regions had become dependent on these services for communication, commerce and societal connections. These are smaller scale examples of what is occurring in the US with the insidious integration of government into the economy and our individual lives and the dependencies being created.

If you feel pressure from almost every area of your life, you aren't imagining it. Eight years of Obama accelerated a process that began under FDR, but the Biden Administration has taken the Cloward-Piven strategy, one designed to overwhelm the welfare system, collapse it and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income, to an entirely new level. What the Bidenistas have done is apply Cloward-Piven to every single thing they have touched, stressing the national economy and every institution and policy to the breaking point.

Even our culture has been so loaded with absurdity, that a correction would come is not unthinkable.

The issue is that the closer to the edge the interrelated systems get, the more opportunities there are for any one system to fail, bringing it all down.

It has already happened once.

The policies leading to the mortgage bubble and its subsequent bursting is an example of how this can happen in the financial system and it almost brought down the global economy. Many would argue that it did and we have been living in an undead zombie economy since, a delayed global depression propped up by massive public debt and unworkable economic theories.

Do everything you can to be self sufficient, cut debt as much as you can, and prepare.

I hope our preparations go unneeded, but we are so close to the edge today, any misstep could lead to catastrophe and when the GOP wins in the coming midterms, pushing back from the edge will not be without pain.

I still believe we will win, but I also believe that fate not only favors the bold, it favors the prepared.