Not exactly what you were asking for, but Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile" might be of interest to you. It's about how many human made things e.g. machines, the economy, etc. are fragile and get weaker/collapse under stress. In contrast many organic things (e.g. muscles) are antifragile, i.e., they gain from (small) stressors. Definitely an interesting read.
Kudos to the people at Discord. Just a few minutes after I got disconnected they already tweeted about the issue. Some minutes later and they have a message in their desktop app confirming it's an issue with Cloudflare. All while Cloudflare's statuspage says there are 'minor outages'.
As a percentage of total traffic, a 'minor' outage for Cloudflare probably equates to a significant outage for a non-trivial amount of the internet.
It will also be especially noticeable to end-users, because sites using Cloudflare are typically high-traffic sites, and so a 'minor' issue that affects only a handful of sites is still going to be noticed by millions of people.