The internet keeps breaking in the same three ways

Line up the season's incident reports, the February BGP leak, the AI-initiated change Amazon disclosed, a 50-hour Azure regional outage rooted in a networking configuration change, and last week's thermal shutdown, and the taxonomy writes itself. Three failure shapes, recurring with the reliability the systems themselves aspire to.

Configuration change is the trigger. Analysts tracking the outage cluster keep landing on the same lead cause: BGP updates, capacity adjustments, firewall rules, software pushed to control planes. Almost never the hardware, almost never an attacker. The systems are mostly killed by their own operators' hands, increasingly automated hands, moving faster than their validation.

Routing is the amplifier. A bad config inside one building is an incident; a bad config that touches BGP is geography. The protocol's trust model, still fundamentally "believe what your neighbor announces," converts local mistakes into global absence faster than any human can type the rollback.

Concentration is the blast radius. Six years of outage history read as a lesson in how much of the internet shares three providers, and within them, a few beloved regions. Northern Virginia is not a place anymore. It is a single point of emotional support for the global economy.

None of the three is news to anyone who operates things. What the season adds is simultaneity: the triggers are accelerating (automation commits config faster), while the amplifier and the blast radius stand still. That ratio only moves one direction.

The builder's read: you cannot fix BGP or de-concentrate the cloud from your desk. You can decide, today, which of your dependencies would take you down by proxy, and whether your own config pipeline has the review gates the hyperscalers keep retrofitting after the fact. Their postmortems are your free consulting. The tuition was someone else's outage.