Coinbase was down for seven hours and had to “work through the night” because an air conditioner failed. For those that don’t know - an Availability Zone just means a data center in AWS-speak. Typically, people who use AWS spread their apps across multiple Availability Zones and even across multiple Regions. AWS makes this easy to do for even small businesses. Here we have the CEO of Coinbase saying they didn’t do that because of latency concerns. This is what we call bullshit. Brian is saying if they made their system redundant then customers’ connections to Coinbase would be slower. This statement is sort of true but seems to be designed to fool non-technical people. Because any technical person knows that Coinbase could have fairly easily designed their system to fail over to a secondary Availability Zone AND THEIR CUSTOMERS COULD’VE FOLLOWED THEM. In such a design, no additional latency is introduced. Coinbase knows this, they just don’t seem very good at their job. Which makes sense when they’re saying they’re laying people off because non-technical people are using AI to do technical work.