A closer look
You think a localized AWS server outage is chaotic? Try losing all communication for an entire massive borough. In 1977, a disastrous fire ripped through a New York Telephone switching center in the East Village, melting the absolute life out of massive electromechanical crossbar switches. This wasn't a matter of simply rebooting a mainframe; it was a physical apocalypse of molten copper and grease. 170,000 phones went dead instantly. It required an army of 4,000 technicians working around the clock for nearly a month, manually splicing millions of tiny wires back together, just to get people back to verbally ignoring each other.
