When AOL Stopped Working (1996)

▤ Summary

The article revisits a 1996 AOL service outage and uses it to explore how outages, capacity issues, and incident response shape user experience. It connects the event to modern operational practices such as SRE, monitoring, and service level management. The piece also compares the old internet era with today’s always-on expectations for software services. For vendors and partners, the story highlights the importance of reliability tooling, incident management, and infrastructure observability.

▦ Linked Companies