Butterfly Effect — when something harmless leads to massive disasters!
Learn about the Butterfly Effect via Tech & Historical examples of issues around this phenomenon.
The butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. — Source: https://fs.blog/the-butterfly-effect/
The famed Butterfly Effect is a harmless or limited change in a system that leads to something catastrophic somewhere else (connected to the initial event).
I was inspired to write about this after Meta’s outage (on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads) yesterday:
While we are yet to get an official root cause report, it’s believed to be a minor software maintenance work in an unrelated area that led to the outage.
PS: If you are not a medium member, click here to read the full story.
This reminds me of a similar outage a few months ago on Google Cloud Services.
A minor software change destined for the Test environment was pushed to the Production environment, causing an outage for over 17 hrs!
The Butterfly Effect has also been seen in Historical events. I will share a couple of my favorite ones.
Vietnam War
Former POTUS Woodrow Wilson (WW)was sent a letter by Ho Chi Minh (HCM) in 1919 to discuss Vietnam’s independence from France.
WW ignored the letter from HCM, who was angered by this and studied Marxism and became a staunch communist.
Vietnam eventually achieved independence from France; however, it was now split into two parts (under HCM’s influence):
Non-communist South, and Communist North (led by HCM).
The US stepped in to resolve the conflict in the 1960s between the two.
If only WW, had read the letter and met HCM — history would have been different!
Nagasaki Bombing
The initial targets for the US were Hiroshima and Kuroko (a munitions factory).
On the day of the attack, bad weather prevented the airplane from locating the Kuroko factory. After a few passes, a decision was made to target Nagasaki instead.
Imagine the state of history if the weather had been good that day or if the US leader had not decided to target Nagasaki!
Medium Example of Butterfly Effect
I came across this post while writing my own, and it’s a solid example of doing little things that completely transform life’s next events.
Read about how Carl Jeffers has turned his life around by doing one small change —
I hope you enjoyed this history lesson on the Butterfly Effect and that you use it to make small changes to change your life completely!
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| /\/\@X | Bin Jiang | A Shayens Abran | Barbara J. Martin | Rajesh Poovathum kadavil | MyThoo // | Anders Vraa | Daniel T. | Sílvia PM, PhD 🍂 | Robin Ghosh | Ethan Ginsberg | Maddmaster | bLv3r | Bella Smith ⭐ | Magdalena Sz | Jim Clyde Monge | Francisco Iglesias | Lee Byrd | Carl Jeffers | Emily Chan — Life and love sharing | Charlie J 🕊️ | Graeme Fowler | John Hua Technology ☕️🐄🐄🏎️ | Mike Sansone | Elizabeth Gray | Josh Bassett | Rodolfo Anes Silveira, PhD | Lucian Ioan Chirilă | Dipalee Katre Rahangdale | Daimond Simon |