This Week in Startups · Monday, October 26, 2026
In a throwback clip from 2017, Patrick Collison shared the story of Stripe's early days when an upstream data center switch failed and took down their API for eight hours. He described his dread awaiting customer complaints, only to realize that by 1:00 PM, nobody had noticed or cared.
“And it turned out that sort of an upstream switch at our data center had failed. And, nominally, they had redundancy and multiple internet connections, but had been misconfigured. And so it was all down.”
“The darkest moment, of course, was because I was bracing myself for the deluge in complaints and dissatisfied customers and anger and vitriol and everything else. And 1:00 PM rolled around and as far as I could tell, nobody had cared or noticed.”