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?
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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?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Oldest comments (41)
It's always DNS.
We really need a better alternative...
A human guide..
I think it's highlighted how often I passively open Facebook on my phone but also how little I usually take in when scrolling.
I've felt the whatsapp outage slightly more as that's my default messaging app but it's not hard to fall back to SMS.
I find it strange that all 3 services seem to have a single point of failure.
Kind of feels like the Internet as a whole is lacking in this regard. Other systems may or may not be more robust, but there just isn't as much diversity as there used to be in the world wide web.
I guess the next step would be a peer to peer DNS but that feels like a headache waiting to happen
As someone who hasn't used Facebook for nearly a decade (makes me feel old not gonna lie), I'm finding the effects of the outage on other people more interesting than the outage itself.
I wonder if anyone who uses these services will realize how much they actual spend on them. Or if they will find they don't really need/want them. (this is especially true for the social media apps)
Odds are most will just go back to their usual usage once its back up tho ;D
Probably the biggest shame of Facebook is how many restaurants, etc. closed down their websites and only have a Facebook. It's a shame bigger than one incident, but it's something to think about.
I think restaurants ditching menus for facebook is a symptom of something larger though. A lot of web dev agencies out there either won't work with projects the size of a restaurant menu, or will way over sell what is needed. Most restaurant's need a handful of static HTML pages to display basic info, something that could be done by a FE dev in less than a day. My first job tried to pitch a massive wordpress build with all kinds of stuff for like $50k to a local restaurant that just needed an online menu.
I can't blame those small businesses for ditching their costly websites and just throwing an FB page together, cheap and easy does it, and for web devs or agencies there's no money to be made anyway on these small websites, so I'd say win/win situation ...
Why's that a shame if I may ask? As a small/medium size business an FB page seems an easy and practical way to get a web presence with minimal cost and effort - I'd say this is one of the most obvious "real" benefits of FB (most of the other benefits are mainly for the sake of FB's and Marc Z's pockets lol) ...
I personally haven't ran into any restaurants with their menu being isolated only to Facebook. I've ran into more restaurants that have QR codes to get online menus during the pandemic. This doesn't include all those other restaurants that integrate with mobile ordering/delivery.
The on restaurant I know that has a weak online presence is actually thinking about closing shop 100% due to the stresses of the pandemic. However, even this place had integrated with mobile ordering/delivery.
Its possible I'm just avoiding those places, or where I live that just "isn't a thing", but I can see and understand there are places where that is more of the norm.
It's interesting for me because I didn't find out about it for hours since I apparently don't use any Facebook things, with the sole exception of the Quest 2 which requires an account... and as far as I know it was unaffected because it doesn't actually use Facebook in normal running. I gather I'm an exception.
Oh, and I got an email from a friend for the first time in so long it felt like a handwritten letter.
I used it as an opportunity to nag my friends about federated systems.
I think It's good time for people like me to argue why they don't use Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp 😅
Everyone is on fire while me ..
I use those services but I only really care about contacting people and good old SMS is still standing 😁
Looks like Facebooks BGP routing went "poof" just up in smoke... I am intrigued to find out exactly what happen. As things unravel.
Yes, this is going to be a fascinating retrospective.
Ahhh, peace and quiet.
I believe its a DNS propagation issue, and Facebook will be just a start . we might see such outrages if this is a cyber attack . Even if its not , black hats got one more door to explore....
The state level actors must have known about the weakness of the BGP forever. They also decided to not do anything about it after all this may come in handy one day.
A friend of mine is a security enthusiast/ hobbyist and he explained to me a hack using the BGP years ago.
Now I have other things to do - I like to create things and I don’t hack.
But if he could figure it out - most certainly others know about it. And if they haven’t used it then that’s because they keep it around as another option in their quiver.
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.
Coming back online now?
When I'm down, I treat myself to some chocolate. I like Lindt chocolates the best.
Maybe some chocolate would help Facebook cheer up.