Thanks to the internet’s on-call teams

If you're reading this, I hope you had a good holiday season. If you watched sports, including the Beyoncé bowl, I hope your stream experience was flawless. If you bought video games or consoles for yourself or your family, I hope the download speeds and play experiences were perfect. If you needed a break from the festivities, I hope that the news sites, travel sites, and online shopping sites where you could buy what you _really_ wanted were fast and responsive. If you used the time off to hack on a new project or idea, I hope your package downloads went quickly, hosting options were seamless, AI coding tools were responsive, and any tutorial blogs you referenced loaded instantly.

Also, if you work for a company that shapes the internet in any way, I hope you were able to reflect and recharge. 

Doing the necessary work to keep the products we use secure and stable over the holidays is often a thankless and overlooked responsibility. That’s a wrong we’d like to correct – if you gave up a portion of your holiday for an on-call responsibility, we’re grateful for that work. Thank you.

It takes a great deal of work to design, build, and secure systems at a global scale. We've written about it, and the abstract challenges are generally understood within the industry. What's less acknowledged is the on-call responsibilities around operating these systems – the humans ready for emergencies or abnormalities that require a skilled expert to make decisions and take corrective action. Yes, systems are becoming more automated and resilient; many rudimentary issues from past years that would page an engineer are self-mitigated today through sound abstraction layers. However, these systems still require on-call teams as a final layer for intelligent human decision-making. 

You gave up a portion of your holiday season to help contribute to the greater reliability and security of the ecosystem we all enjoy. Whether it was supporting a small business's successful year-end or one of the largest broadcasters streaming the most popular entertainment on the planet, your teams ensured that it was a success for users and customers.

This is one of the magical aspects of the Internet – that a worldwide ecosystem of people can come together to guarantee that we all have a happy holiday. So, if you had a part to play in securing and stabilizing the digital world the population often takes for granted, we’re grateful to you, your work, and your profession.