Something that I have started doing lately is asking ChatGPT et al to check usenet for reactions from users about events (if it is the right 80's/90's time period). Sure enough, aol.sucks on usenet had some choice words about the outage:<p>>What does Cisco stand for?? Case's Internet System Crapped Out. That's right, Steve Case and his AOL pig fell victim to some mickey
mouse networking equipment. Unfortunatly for AOL, they were the first
ISP to feel real pain from using equipment made by Cisco Systems.<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/iqjd7crtPs4</a>
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/K75nltM31Bw</a>
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/vVup-HvlPWM</a><p>Here's a reporter asking for comments and getting laughed at and trolled:
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/alt.aol-sucks/c/mStonlu_H8E</a><p>Some more serious reactions over on comp.risks:
<a href="https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2" rel="nofollow">https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/30#subj2</a>
<a href="https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3" rel="nofollow">https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/31#subj3</a>
<a href="https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3" rel="nofollow">https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/18/41#subj3</a><p>>Yesterday morning, I got a call because their mail system was backing
up heavily. It took a while to discover the cause, but it turned
out to be AOL. Because AOL's incoming mail from the Internet runs on
relatively slow systems, and because they receive hundreds of thousands of
Internet messages a day, they have 30 systems to receive incoming mail, all
pointed at from the AOL.COM name. That means that any mail system trying
to send mail to AOL would have to individually try all 30 addresses before
giving up. Translate that to a 60 second (typical) wait for a connection
timeout, and you've got a 30 minute time-in-queue for an AOL message.<p>nanog on seclists was an interesting read too
<a href="https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51" rel="nofollow">https://seclists.org/nanog/1996/Aug/51</a><p>Flamewar over sendmail not handling outage well
> Remember the AOL outage? One host built up a backlog of 2000 messages
for AOL---but, because it was running qmail, it didn't even slow down.
Meanwhile, sendmail users were choking on much smaller queues.
<a href="https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/comp.mail.sendmail/c/TeNdv2laT94</a>