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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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Facebook is down, discuss...

I'm curious about what comes to mind. Whether it is software related or otherwise, what does today's outage evoke for you?

What's the worst case scenario for Facebook?

Latest comments (41)

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Bernd Wechner

Therapeutic.

That's what I thought of it. I mean nothing to worry about, there was no doubt a load of effort going to be thrown at it, perhaps as much as the US invests into hurricane relief as they mighty dollar needs saving as much as poor folk on floodplains in that grand old nation I'm confident. But the sort of thing that can hit any service any time, and on a bad day a load of them at once, and one really bad day lots and lots of them for a long time etc. And it's nice for folk to remember, that well, nothing is 24/7 forever ;-).

Besides, most other social media channels were up tod iscuss it (as was this one).

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briang123 profile image
Brian Gaines

Wait, what happened???😜

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pandaquests profile image
Panda Quests

Didn't even notice 🤣

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timur_kh profile image
Timur Kh

productivity must have shot up across the globe though

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emmaisa59135261 profile image
Emma Isabella

use alternative social media app

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Karan Gandhi

From software perspective, - Oauth failures.
Facebook is a popular Oauth provider and if that is down , lot of customers who use Facebook to login are essentially locked out.

This is good time for developers to think about scenarios when/if major Oauth providers like Google,Facebook, Apple fail and create fallback mechanisms for account recovery.

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Jay Jeckel

The best five and a half hours since social media infected the web. Too bad it wasn't permanent and didn't take twitter with it.

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Stephen Belovarich

Good riddance!

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Raymond Neil Cerezo

this is a comprehensive info:
blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-f...

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Dillon Maks

I feel as though the timing on the release of the Pandora papers, and the case with a whistle blower trying to prove that facebook algorithmically prioritizes money over safety may have something to do with it. DNS and such seems like a distraction, but no way I’d be able to know for sure.

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Nik

“Whistleblowers” which argue for censorship aren’t whistleblowers, they’re agents for the other side.

At no time in history has it been the good guys trying to suppress information. Every time it’s been the bad guys. And yes even the worst of the bad guys sold censorship to the population as something good if not necessary.

It’s like I’ve always said - you can lie about your intentions but you can’t hide your intentions. Someone’s intentions are encoded in their actions.

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ItsASine (Kayla)

I've been shouting this from the virtual rooftops all day. This is my Epstein.

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dillon_maks profile image
Dillon Maks

Convenient timing. I’m not doubting that there were DNS issues, but they easily could’ve been exaggerated to diminish coverage over the pandora papers, and gives facebook a chance to cover up anything.

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kayis profile image
K

It's probably about time for decentralized/Web3 alternatives.

I mean, sure, Solana was down too a few weeks ago. But generally, this should be the way forward.

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willsmart • Edited

It probably has nothing to do with a rogue dependency, but this has maybe a 5% chance of fitting what happened
Original here: https://xkcd.com/2347/(Orig xkcd image xkcd.com/2347/ )

Edit: this is the actual thing that happened: blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-f...
It seems that some poor soul at fb issued a bunch of BGP withdrawal updates.

I've updated the pic, bringing it up to maybe a 90% change of being on the money

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Nik

Interesting. I was looking into the BGP a few years back and I think we realized that that system would allow for massive hacks. It’s an ancient system that is poorly protected yet at the core of everything…

So it could be this was a mistake as they claim.

Or it would also be the first vector of attack a serious actor would use.

It’s exactly like this picture if the internet is a castle with many locks gates and controls then the BGP is the back door that someone left open.

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

I had a similar thought when I heard about what happened:

months ago: "Hey, did you hear? Bob got fired the other day" - "Bob? What did that guy do here anyway?"
now: "Oh."

😂

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Fred Richards

I thought it was DNS at first, too. It's kinda ironic that it ended up being a BGP problem. It's almost as if Facebook forgot how to be an internet company.

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Eljay-Adobe

When I'm down, I treat myself to some chocolate. I like Lindt chocolates the best.

Maybe some chocolate would help Facebook cheer up.

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Sherry Day

Coming back online now?

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Bertil Muth

I use Facebook as an example of “basic factors“ (or dissatisfiers, according to the Kano model). We‘ve come to expect social media to be always available. That doesn‘t make us particularly happy, we‘re just used to it. But when it‘s not available, it makes the news. Case in point today.

The interesting part for me is that we don’t even notice the change as it happens. Anybody remember the Twitter fail whale? Outages were much more common a few years ago.