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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

independent.co.uk

21–30 of 254 posts

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#21
post #18

One interesting thing I've noticed from this (not sure if this is just my experience or if others noticed as well) but none of the ads seem to be impacted by this. Certainly makes me wonder if those are on a more prioritized and entirely separate infra and SLA that is designed to be more resilient and highly available.

Our local transit system installed video boards showing arrival times for the next trains. It was paid for and operated by an advertising company who in return were able to run ads on their video boards. The functionality for arrival times rarely worked but the displaying of ads never failed. It was obvious where the company's priorities were at.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#22
post #18

One interesting thing I've noticed from this (not sure if this is just my experience or if others noticed as well) but none of the ads seem to be impacted by this. Certainly makes me wonder if those are on a more prioritized and entirely separate infra and SLA that is designed to be more resilient and highly available.

It's a lot easier to serve ads than your custom photos. The ads are more generic, easier to cache globally, and show to a lot of people. They can also fall back to super generic ads if the database is unavailable to customize them.

But your photos don't have a fallback.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#24
I first noticed Instagram then realized it was Facebook and their other properties such as What's App as well. Is very odd all of these major outages this week. By Cloudflare at least said it was an employee error, so assuming it's not subtle attacks by other countries unless companies like Cloudflare are required to legally provide an alternate story for national security.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#26
post #16

One interesting thing I noticed is the ALT text that is displayed in place of the missing images. It shows how their image recognition is classifying everything. I guess a lot of my friends drink as a lot of the alt text was like "Image may contain: drink"

I noticed that too (mtg meme group just showed up as a wall of "image may contain:text" placeholders), but I didn't realize it was an outage and I thought that I'd accidentally turned on some kind of really annoying safe-mode.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#27
post #25

Surprised this impacts Whatsapp as well which seemed to store everything encrypted on your device...

It needs to download it from the CDN first. The actual implementation is your media are stored encrypted on a CDN for a certain amount of time then you receive the keys as an encrypted message.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#28
post #25

Surprised this impacts Whatsapp as well which seemed to store everything encrypted on your device...

Likewise. If it's a well-thought out encrypted blob store, fine...

But given that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp would seem to have vastly different caching and security requirements - its hard to believe.

Is any of this architecture publicly documented?

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