It seems like every year or so we have some gigantic technology meltdown in this industry.
Imagine something like this happening at the NYSE, CME, et. at. Or, simply think about the last time you heard about a nationwide credit/debit card outage...
Why can't we have our national infrastructure systems running at least as reliably as the Amex network?
These systems are all information clearinghouses at the end of the day. If we have matching engines that flawlessly process millions of trades per second every day and mainframes that provide resilient source of truth, I think we could consider the same for a life safety critical system as well.
All of those systems have outages all the time, mostly isolated incidents when it comes to NYSE, CME and similar (here is the outage page for NYSE for example: https://www.nyse.com/market-status/history). Visa, Mastercard and others have nationwide outages from time to time too, they're in no way invincible like you seem to imply. Latest Visa outage I can remember must have been around 2018/2019 sometime, but probably it happened later than that too, except I didn't notice it then.
Imagine something like this happening at the NYSE, CME, et. at. Or, simply think about the last time you heard about a nationwide credit/debit card outage...
Why can't we have our national infrastructure systems running at least as reliably as the Amex network?
These systems are all information clearinghouses at the end of the day. If we have matching engines that flawlessly process millions of trades per second every day and mainframes that provide resilient source of truth, I think we could consider the same for a life safety critical system as well.