AOL was down (1996) (2026)

- ngrok is a company that provides secure tunnels to expose local development servers to the internet, widely used by software engineers. - This post recounts the 1996 AOL outage, which crippled the largest US internet provider (then ~6 million users) for 19 hours. AOL was the "on-ramp" for most Americans at the time, so the outage effectively shut off a huge portion of the consumer internet. - AOL's network was a proprietary, centralized walled garden (email, chat, newsgroups, content) layered on top of dial-up connections. When its internal hub failed, no amount of redundant dial-up modems could help—the architecture had a single point of failure. - The piece draws a parallel to modern API-based infrastructure: companies that rely on a single cloud provider, CDN, or API gateway face the same hidden risk, and ngrok itself is part of that ecosystem. The lesson is about architectural assumptions hiding in plain sight.