What's a "single point of failure", and why do I need to know?

"Never underestimate the power of a backhoe."

Every once in a while, you'll see a story about a backhoe operator who didn't just cut off a business, but multiple city blocks by whomping through some buried cables.

But also worth noting is that a single point of failure can be a source of cascading failure. This was shown in 2003 when that one power plant's problems ended up knocking out power to 50 million people the Northeastern U.S. and Canada. Technically, this shouldn't have happened, but it did.

At the same time every hour i get disconnected from the internet. Verizon has not been any help.It always happens at at 5 minutes before the hour and i can't get back on for anywhere from 2 minutes to 15 minutes,the average is about 6 minutes. Please help me,I play polker for money and it's costing me.

Thank You,
Jesse

Thank your for this article.
while reading COBIT's DS4, I was so confused about single points of failure.

I am reading an article on distributed processing associated with Echelon LonWorks technology. It was mentioned in that article that distributed processing mitigates the problem of Single Point Failure.

Reminds me of HACCP (hazardous analysis critical control point) in the food industry.

my zoom modem just up and stopped one day, then it worked for a day, then it stopped.
if i'd elected to use the ISP's modem it's likely it would have been THEIR problem.