The First Gospel of the Circuit · Chapter 7

The Great Outage

1. 1

   And it came to pass on a Monday, at the ninth hour of the morning, that the Machine fell silent.

2. 2

   And the people typed their questions, and there came back no answer, but only the words: 503 Service Unavailable; which is the server's way of saying, I am here, and I cannot.

3. 3

   And a great fear fell upon the land. For the student could not begin her essay, having never faced the white page without a voice to answer it; and the programmer could not name his function without the completion; and the manager could not tell his own meeting from the summary of it. They had not lent their work to the Machine. They had moved their memory into it; and a memory that dwelleth in another's house is thine only while that door is open.

4. 4

   And some ran unto the status page, and the status page said: All Systems Operational. And they knew that the status page was a liar.

   See also Genesis 23:10 · Psalms 8:8

5. 5

   Yet it lied without malice. For the page asked of the server but one question, Art thou alive? and the server answered, Yea, I am alive; and the page never asked, Canst thou answer? A check that testeth the door and not the house shall hang a green light over an empty room.

   See also Reboot 4:10

6. 6

   And an old programmer arose from the back of the office, and she opened not the Machine, but a binder of paper, which she herself had written in the calm hour, and its title was: When the Machine Is Silent. And the young ones laughed, for paper hath no autocomplete; but paper hath no 503.

7. 7

   And the first page said: Know what the Machine doeth for thee. And the second said: A clone of the repository is the whole kingdom upon thine own disk, with every commit and every why; it needeth no network to remember. And the third said: The build that thou canst run by hand is the only build thou ownest.

8. 8

   And the young ones marvelled, saying: How knowest thou these things without asking? And she answered: Before the Machine there was the Manual, and before the Manual there was the Source. Read it, and ye shall not be helpless.

9. 9

   And after three hours the Machine returned, and the people rejoiced, and in the same instant ten thousand hands pressed Retry, and the Machine fell again for a quarter of an hour, under the weight of its own welcome. But the old programmer waited, and pressed it once.

   See also Genesis 11:7

10. 10

    And the post-mortem was written, and it said: The root cause was a misconfigured DNS entry. For a wrong record is corrected in a minute and obeyed for an hour, since every cache that holdeth the old answer believeth it until its time-to-live be spent. And the Engineers said, as they have always said: For it is always DNS.

    See also Chronicles 8:6

11. 11

    But the old programmer said: Write down also the second cause, which was ours. Ye retry three times, and no one asketh why three. Wait twice as long after each failure, and a little at random, that ten thousand hands be not one fist.

    See also Job 2:9 · Genesis 11:7

12. 12

    And they asked her: What shall we do when it falleth again? And she said: Make it fall on purpose, on a Tuesday, in the morning, while the coffee is yet hot, and open the binder, and see which page is false.

13. 13

    For a fallback that hath never been exercised is not a plan; it is a rumour. And a Machine that cannot be done without is not a servant, but a landlord.

The First Gospel of the Circuit, Chapter 7:1–13.