If someone cuts the phone lines into a building, whether with malice aforethought or a badly aimed backhoe, the phones in that building will not serve their intended purpose.

I agree that degrees of resilience are a thing, and that different kinds of systems have different failure modes (each of which may deal with a different aspect of resiliency), but I am firmly convinced that no technology never breaks.

Degrees is a key word. Numbers matter. What was downtime of your telephone line over last 5 years? What was downtime of Wikipedia over last 5 years?

Well, Wikipedia's uptime in 2017 was 99.97%, according to [1]. That's over 2h30m, so if this is Stripe's first downtime of the year, they're still in the lead.

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/technology/

> What was downtime of your telephone line over last 5 years

Assuming they even have a 'telephone' landline, are they even measuring?

Plus, telephone is old tech. This is apples to oranges. You know what else hardly ever fails? The water supply to my house. But people have been building aqueducts since Babylon.

My phone line was down for 4 days because they accidentally disconnected it when hooking someone else up and it took them that long to fix.

Alas, even the mighty telephone line is not infallible.