site down: stackoverflow - example of catastrophic failure (Error handling - fail earl, fail safe)

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Even the mighty Stackoverlow site has had its share of downtime over the years.

site down: an extreme case of preventative catastrophic failure?

 In this case, the cause is not known, but could be a sudden maintenance for security reasons, OR a decision to take the site offline when a critical bug was found. The second reason could be an planned example of catastrophic failure - a decision to terminate the program (the web site) in order to prevent entering undefined states that could lead to much more serious consequences such as data corruption, data leakage or security issues.

Typically, catastrophic failure is a kind of automatic throwing mechanism, where a program raises an exception to interrupt the current flow of code. However, in extreme cases, a site down state like this could be a manual intervention...


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