Mathworks, the company behind MATLAB, is entering week two of a huge service outage: https://status.mathworks.com/ (if this is why you are here, welcome! 
)
It affects downloads, package installation, the Online environment and in some cases every day use, basically anything that requires access to the license server, as well as their online documentation.
What are Julia’s points of failure? In what sense is Julia safe from this kind of outage?
Most important are the Pkg servers. You can check their status here:
Looks a lot more green than the Matlab cite! 
There was an outage two years ago, see:
tl; dr: Github and Pkg Server
Currently relying on AWS S3: julialang-s3.julialang.org
In addition to julialang.org, there are a number of mirror sites that store binary packages of julia.
The documentation site seems to be based on a github deployment + Fastly CDN.
But you can always choose to use the documentation that comes with your local julia binary. All you need is an HTTP server to view it.
~\.julia\juliaup\julia-1.11.5+0.x64.w64.mingw32\share\doc\julia\html\enGithub/Gitlab + Alibaba CloudCurrently depends on
build.jlArtifacts.toml that do not have the download attribute specified.You can set up your Pkg Server by using JuliaPackaging/PkgServer.jl
and johnnychen94/StorageMirrorServer.jl
The Chinese community has set up some mirrors of Pkg Server.
They are mainly set up by universities and commercial companies.
(Post in Chinese) Julia PkgServer 镜像服务及镜像站索引 - Julia中文社区
We mainly use GitHub, but many repositories have mirrors available locally or online.
Maybe we could set up some official git repo mirror on gitlab/bitbucket/git.sr.ht/...
Currently relying on
tl; dr: Github and Pkg Server
Note that these aren’t single points of failure. They are redundant. The PkgServer stores a fully redundant copy of every registered version of every registered package, and Pkg allows installing packages from github/gitlab URLS. As such, neither going down is enough to cause a full outage.
For what it’s worth, the current rumor is that this is a cyberattack (possibly ransomware?).
I haven’t used Matlab for many years. Before I think I can use it without network, but you mentioned “license server”. Does that mean you need Internet connection to use Matlab?
You need the license center to install Matlab or any new Matlab toolboxes. I have Matlab working on one machine, but cannot install it on a second machine because the server is down. And from the university I always get a license for year, so if it should expire I cannot renew it (until they fixed the outage). I only need it for the software I wrote 12 years ago, since then I am happy with Julia.
It’s been ~6 years since I ran our site’s Matlab licensing, but I’m pretty sure they still support emailing you a license file(s) that you can point to during the install and, in a pinch, can send USB with installer executables – just reach out to your organizations sales representative.
Yep, they just confirmed it was ransomware. https://status.mathworks.com/
Curious because I haven’t used MATLAB in a LONG time, but why are the complaints online (mostly reddit) so serious? I get that not being able to install or update packages is usually a show-stopper for writing code, but there are some stories about not being able to run their usual projects. Shouldn’t that be possible with offline use? Was there some unnecessary server check getting in people’s way or is MATLAB Online just a lot more common now?
I can work perfectly fine with Matlab. The mandatory updated happened to me only once and it was in September.
What I find more annoying is no being able to access the FEX.
To my understanding, MATLAB does regular license checks on some kinds of installation (depending on what type of license structure your organization signed up for). Some users were simply locked out from their offline environments some time in the last week.