Two thin strands of glass. When combined, these two strands of glass are so thin they still wouldn’t fill a drinking straw. That’s known in tech circles as a “fiber pair,” and these two thin strands of glass carry all the information of the world’s leading archive in and out of our data centers. When you think about it, it sounds kind of crazy that it works at all, but it does. Every day. Reliably.

Except this past Monday night, here in California…

On Monday, June 24, the real world had other ideas. As a result, the Internet Archive was down for 15 hours. For Californians, this was less of a big deal: those 15 hours stretched from mid-Monday evening (9:11pm on the US West coast), to 11:51am on Tuesday. Many Californians were asleep during several hours of that time. But in the Central European time zone (e.g. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Tunisia), that fell on early Tuesday morning (06:11) to mid-Tuesday evening (21:51). And in the entire country of India, it was late Tuesday morning (09:41) to just after midnight on Wednesday (00:21).