Unreliability of the Internet

This is my new Moment of Zen!

Our modern world does not work without computers, cell phones, emails, the web.... what if all servers are shut down or break down?? What would be the effects on the economy, politics, the daily-life?
We could see it on April 21st, 2009, when the clients of the German Telekom could not use their cell phones for talking for only a few hours! All based on a break down of the servers due to a software problem. Subsequent to this power failure they were allowed to send short messages the following sunday for free! This reveals how important new media devices are for our society and it also underlines the dependence on these devices.

I came across such an unreliable moment when I tried to find information about "Tailrank" for class... I used several search engines, such as ask.com, but Google as well, and they showed comparable results. The first entry was linked to the website "www.tailrank.com". "Well, sounds good, I should find information there", I thought without having a clue what ´Tailrank´ could be. But what happened? I clicked on the page, and it said: "Tailrank is taking a Gliding Lesson - We´re doing a big DB upgrade... should be fun :)..." They have been doing this upgrade since Tuesday, April 5th, when will it be finished??

This is such a case of the Unreliability of the Internet. There are of course other sources helping to find out what ´Tailrank´ could be, but I expect not to get these information at first hand! But that is in turn good about the internet: if one source does not work, there are enough others absorbing the losses so that there is always a way to gather information. So far so good.

But what if there is a "Web-Apocalypse"?? That´s a topic for the next MoZ ;)