Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people’s beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a widespread outage that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

XKCD 2347: Dependency

XKCD 2347: Dependency. Original caption: “Someday ImageMagick will finally break for good and we’ll have a long period of scrambling as we try to reassemble civilization from the rubble.”

Except the random person in Nebraska has been replaced by AWS, Google Cloud, or whoever caused the outage this week. And that kind of bothers me, because it misses the point entirely.

Cloud providers aren’t small indie companies

The original comic is a joke and expression of concern at the fact that lots of our modern technology depends on small projects that largely are maintained by a single driven developer writing code in their spare time. They are important, yet fragile. This is not comparable to the outages we’ve seen this year.

To contrast, these four cloud providers are, for better or worse, important to the web as we know it. But they’re not small. We should recognize that these are huge players, with revenues larger than the GDP of many countries.1 Cloudflare isn’t anywhere near as big as the other three, but it still has a proportionally gigantic impact on the web due to how much data flows through them.

In addition to how important they are, they are all also among the largest and most valuable companies in the world. It’s concerning how reliant we are on just this handful of players, and when governments become more reliant on them, that is a huge risk. It is however the same, boring risk of influence and dependence it always is with large companies, rather than a risk of single individuals disappearing and taking our technology with them.

Support your guy in Nebraska

There are many people who are effectively a one-man show supporting most of modern technology in their spare time without compensation, and those deserve our support as a society, or at the very least recognition. I’ve tried to highlight a few here.

  • The comic waves at ImageMagick, which was created by John Cristy while working at DuPont. This is really the only fact I can find about it. Every article delving into the history of ImageMagick mentions this and nothing else. I don’t know much about John Cristy, so I can’t comment on him. However, ImageMagick is currently maintained by Dirk Lemstra, who lives in the Netherlands. He does appear to do this all in his spare time.

  • Finnish developer Lasse Collin is the main force behind the XZ compression library. Unfortunately, he is more famous for the social engineering attack on him than he is for his work. Regardless, XZ is an essential piece of software for many ecosystems that require high compression rate regardless of CPU cost. It has been the Arch Linux package compression algorithm of choice for years until it was replaced with zstd.

  • cURL developer and AI slop victim Daniel Stenberg has surprisingly beaten the odds and made a career out of maintaining his open source project, but that doesn’t make him less admirable. Did I recommend his blog enough yet? He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

  • The late Bram Moolenaar is known for two things: the VIM text editor, and his support for orphaned children in Uganda. The latter of the two has long been the first message you see when opening the former. He lived in Lisse, the Netherlands, and the editor he created continues to be one of the most important tool on the belt of system administrators everywhere.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, though if I’ve overlooked someone significant (perhaps actually in Nebraska?) then don’t take that as me disregarding their contributions. There are many more, but the very nature of who they are prevents listing them all. I might update this list for a while, so do get in touch.2

Update November 26th

I asked and people delivered. Thank you to all of you who reached out with helpful suggestions. The following maintainers also deserve our recognition:

And finally, I’d like to give an honourable mention for the SQLite team. They don’t technically qualify under my rules, but they’ve been suggested more than once and it’s definitely an underappreciated piece of software. Curiously, they do not even take contributions, made their own version control system, and release the code as public domain rather than one of the more common licenses.

What next?

Relevant XKCD comics are nothing new to the field. When I was still in university I was educated3 by my friends on the ones that apply most often. I have since become part of the problem and have been making references to it with others. In a way it’s a rite of passage for a certain kind of geek. So here I am trying to educate the next generation on what things mean.

On the bright side: some people on Reddit do appear to “get it” and point out the sheer ridiculousness of implying the cloud providers are tiny unassuming parts. Others have instead taken the joke and ran with it, off of a cliff, to the point where it no longer makes sense. By the time I finish writing this, it’s probably already old and not funny any more. Nature is healing, I suppose.

  1. If Microsoft were a country, and we’d take their annual revenue (2024) as their GDP, it would make them the 57th largest country by GDP, ahead of Qatar and just behind Hungary. Google would be 45th, just behind Iran. ↩︎

  2. For people to qualify as “person in Nebraska,” they should be the sole, largely unpaid maintainer for a widely-used open source project. Please, do open my eyes to the many talented people out there. ↩︎

  3. Perhaps it’s more fair to call it indoctrinated, but that makes it sound like a bad thing. ↩︎