A human postmortem of the 1996 AOL outage

Category: Engineering post
Status: discussion
Sources: post, discussion
Summary: Mac Chaffee, a platform engineer, revisited AOL's 19-hour 1996 outage. Drawing on an interview with AOL's then VP of Operations Matt Korn, the post attributes the outage to a routine maintenance procedure that did not come back online cleanly, and a separate May 1996 incident to a single phase of a three-phase power feed failing before generators could start. The piece argues SRE reliability cases should center human impact, not only cost, and profiles a user who relied on an online bulletin board for medical information during the downtime.
Why it matters: It is a durable reliability-culture write-up with concrete incident detail, useful as an argument for reliability investment beyond financial framing.