Technology is a fragile machine that seems to power everything

This past week we have seen all U.S. flights grounded, people stuck on a cold dark Amtrak train for 29 hours, and every single third-party Twitter client stop working at the same

time. Obviously one of those things is direr than the others but they all share one thing in common — they were brought down because the technology behind them "broke". None of

us should be surprised.I'm not knocking the people responsible for keeping the well-oiled machinery well-oiled. I'm sure it is a difficult and mostly thankless job working behind

the scenes making sure all the band-aids hold and nothing critical fails. But we have to realize that most of the time, technology is like a big Jenga tower where it only takes one

wrong move.You have experienced this firsthand, just like I have. Internet service providers go down. Phone carriers have outages. Instagram and every other service many people use

and enjoy can randomly go on the fritz and always will be prone to random outages. Usually, they are quickly fixed. Usually (opens in new tab).We hate being inconvenienced by any

and all of this. When WhatsApp or Twitter go down, tech websites like Android Central get flooded with reports of problems so we can get the word out, so I know how much people

hate when the software or service they want to use stops working, even for a little bit.What many of us — I'm often guilty here, too —forget is how complicated even the

simplest thing can be. We're about to record our weekly podcast. This depends on four different services working on our individual computers and one cloud-based communication

service performing as expected. When it comes time to edit it, those services must also work correctly. Finally, the service you use to listen to it and the way you access the

internet need to just work. One bug in the system means it all grinds to a halt.(Image credit: Google)If something as simple as recording an hour-long podcast can depend on so much

technology, imagine what it takes to keep the airline industry up and running. Systems to power the front end so you can get a flight, methods to keep track of where the planes are

so the right one is in the right place at the right time, techniques to keep track of passenger luggage, and so on and so on need to all work flawlessly. All of this, as well as

critical tech that keeps planes in the air and passengers safe — depends on servers, software, and people. When one piece of this technological puzzle is missing, everything has

to stop until it's "fixed". Redundancy, where you have backups of critical pieces of infrastructure running in case one goes kaput, helps and is in place but sometimes it's not