October 4 in business history: a train on borrowed track, a $150 first prize, and six hours offline
Three October 4s — the Orient Express's first run in 1883, the first U.S. Open in 1895, and Facebook's worldwide outage in 2021 — show what each business actually owned, and what that ownership turned out to be worth.
Three 4 Octobers, and on each one a business found out what it actually owned. In 1883 a Belgian engineer put a luxury train on track that belonged to other companies. In 1895 a golf association ran a national championship for eleven players and a purse of $335. In 2021 the company then called Facebook learned that one maintenance command could remove it from the internet.
In each case the value turned out to sit somewhere other than the product.
A train over somebody else's track
On the afternoon of 4 October 1883 the first Orient Express left the Gare de Strasbourg in Paris: sleeping cars and dining cars, built by the Belgian engineer Georges Nagelmackers and his Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits 1. Nagelmackers sold the carriage and the service; the railway underneath belonged to other companies.
The first journey ran night and day as far as Bucharest, then on by a second train to Bulgaria and a ship across the Black Sea. About forty passengers made the run, in cabins with hot water and gas lighting 12. Direct rail service to Constantinople began in 1889 1. Air travel later took the market, and the last direct Paris–Istanbul return journey left on 20 May 1977 12.
Decision mirror: the name was the part the railway companies never held. In 2017 SNCF and Accor created a joint subsidiary to relaunch the Orient-Express brand; Accor owned it outright by 2022, and since 2023 Accor and LVMH have been developing hotels and trains under it 1. The original carriage set is down to seven coaches, four of them listed as historical monuments 1.
A national championship with eleven players
The first U.S. Open was played on Friday 4 October 1895 at Newport Golf Club in Rhode Island, run by the United States Golf Association to close its first championship meeting the day after its first U.S. Amateur finished 34.
Eleven players started: ten professionals and the Canadian amateur Andrew Smith, three of the four amateurs who entered having withdrawn. The field went round Newport's nine holes four times, 2,755 yards in all, and Horace Rawlins, a 21-year-old English professional, shot 91 and 82 for 173 to beat Willie Dunn by two strokes. First prize was $150 and a gold medal, second prize $100 4.
Entries grew from 35 in 1896 to 60 in 1900, 165 in 1913 and 1,064 in 1928; 2025 set a record 3.
Decision mirror: the 126th U.S. Open, at Shinnecock Hills from 18 to 21 June 2026, carried a $22.5 million prize fund and paid $4.5 million to the winner, Wyndham Clark 5. That is 30,000 times Rawlins's $150, and the association that staged the first one still stages it.
Six hours off the internet
At 15:39 UTC on 4 October 2021, Facebook and its apps — Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Mapillary and Oculus — went dark worldwide for six to seven hours 6.
Facebook's engineers described the cause the next day: a routine maintenance command meant to assess global backbone capacity "unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network", and the audit tool built to catch such commands failed 7. The DNS servers then withdrew their route announcements, making Facebook unreachable from the rest of the internet. Recovery took engineers physically into a data centre, because the access systems and debugging tools ran on the same network that was down 67.
The bill arrived the same day. Downdetector logged more than 10 million problem reports, the most for any incident to that date; Facebook's shares fell nearly 5 per cent; and the advertising revenue lost was put at least at $60 million 6.
Decision mirror: AWS lost its Northern Virginia region for most of a day on 19 and 20 October 2025. A latent race condition in the automated DNS management for DynamoDB left the regional endpoint with an empty record the automation could not repair, and the failure spread to new server launches, load balancers and the support console before operators corrected it by hand. AWS has since disabled that DNS automation worldwide 8.
Three questions for the week
- What is the name worth once the service stops? The Orient Express made its last direct run in 1977 and is now a brand Accor owns 1.
- Who holds the rights to the thing that grows? The first U.S. Open paid $150; the 2026 edition paid $4.5 million 35.
- What does an hour offline cost? Six hours of Meta's 2021 outage was put at least at $60 million in advertising, and AWS's 2025 failure ran most of a day 68.
References
- 1
- 2Orient Express, "The legendary history in 10 dates"
orient-express.com
- 3
- 4Wikipedia, "1895 U.S. Open (golf)"
en.wikipedia.org
- 5Wikipedia, "2026 U.S. Open (golf)"
en.wikipedia.org
- 6Wikipedia, "2021 Facebook outage"
en.wikipedia.org
- 7
- 8
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