Q 01/05

Where did Microsoft's Project Natick keep a sealed capsule of 864 servers running for two years?

A) In a desert bunker

B) Inside a disused mine

C) On the seafloor

D) On an Arctic ice sheet

Answer · why

C) On the seafloor

On the seafloor off Orkney, Scotland, the shipping-container-sized vessel ran from 2018 until it was lifted out in July 2020. Seawater at its natural ...

Q 02/05

Which retro ornaments does Cloudflare film in its San Francisco lobby as a source of random numbers?

A) Lava lamps

B) Disco balls

C) Snow globes

D) Plasma globes

Answer · why

A) Lava lamps

Lava lamps, about 100 of them, fill a wall that a camera watches around the clock. The drifting wax gives Cloudflare's servers a backup supply of rand...

Q 03/05

What caused the February 2017 failure that left Amazon's S3 storage service down for hours?

A) A lightning strike

B) A mistyped command

C) A severed fibre cable

D) A cyberattack

Answer · why

B) A mistyped command

A mistyped command did it: an engineer debugging the billing system meant to remove a few servers and took out far more. The crippled subsystems then ...

Q 04/05

Which streaming company built Chaos Monkey, a tool that randomly disables its own live servers?

A) Spotify

B) Hulu

C) Twitch

D) Netflix

Answer · why

D) Netflix

Netflix built it while moving onto Amazon's cloud, then released the code in 2012. It grew into a whole Simian Army of tools that break things on purp...

Q 05/05

Which file-syncing service did Drew Houston conceive after he kept forgetting his USB drive at MIT?

A) Dropbox

B) OneDrive

C) SugarSync

D) Evernote

Answer · why

A) Dropbox

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Houston and fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, with early money from the startup accelerator Y Combinator.