History rhymes. It’s funny that my problem back then was jamming fully formed thoughts into tweets, and now my problem is developing seeds of ideas into fully formed thoughts.
Simply, and without too many details: the load balancer failed to work properly when one server in the cluster stopped responding, causing a cascade of errors which successively crashed all of the other servers (including, interestingly, the RDS database server -- which even Amazon was unable to explain).
Shortly after publishing, I received a phone call from "Apple, Inc.". When I tried to answer, the call dropped. Then my Apple ID account was suddenly unlocked and I got an email from someone saying they are going to try to call again tomorrow.
I didn't expect that tweet to get so much attention. I plan to write more about what exactly happened when my accounts are re-activated.
But to clear a couple of things up:
1. I've since learned that the reason this happened could be due to an unusual confluence of events including Apple Card, autopay, and the online Apple Store.
2. The disabling of iCloud, App Store, and Apple ID accounts is actually an Apple Card policy for overdue accounts, and they have a team dedicated to handling these account de-activation issues. (I think this is absurd, which is why I am drawing attention to it.)
As the author of The Best, I am quite surprised and confused by Rhinehart's suggestion that the piece marks the "death" of Silicon Valley. He does not seem to understand me or what I was saying at all.
Also, "my ilk" are the very people he praises, including Paul Graham and YC founders pre-2012. I'm tempted to write a rebuttal, because while I agree that there was a marked change in the startup community around that time, I think it happened for reasons very different from the ones Rhinehart outlines in his piece.
It's not a marketing gimmick--it's a promise. It's how I want my own blog to be treated.
We announced this publicly so that you now know: if you write on Svbtle, your content is vastly more likely to survive for a long time than if you used your own server (probably) or if you used another publishing startup.
Only in the case of something horribly catastrophic would we resort to using an external service like Archive.org--but unlike other startups, we would work very closely with them to archive all data. And perhaps even give them the domain name.
As I mentioned elsewhere, there are certain things that can be done to keep the service running for at least your lifetime--I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying customers. We will make that public when it's finished.