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Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

independent.co.uk

161–170 of 254 posts

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#162
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

Several european banks are also having issues with their login sites and online services. Backends are working though. I know, it's far fetched to throw them in the same bucket, and I won't, but it feels like there is happening some kind of reorganization on the net, which in the worst case would be some kind of global state-sponsored MITM-layer getting set up, maybe to prepare for new techs like 5G and TLS1.3.

One of the biggest banks in Brazil (state owned) is currently having the same problem, bb.com.br

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#163
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

+ A large unnamed government contractor that has also been having some rare network outages throughout the week.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#164
post #49

Looks like Facebook image store is having issues. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp use the same image store, so all the services are affected.

My concern there is my understanding has always been that WhatsApp implements end to end encryption through the Signal protocol, how can images be stored and be considered end-to-end encrypted? So are only text messages end-to-end? Ignoring logs being uploaded to the cloud.

I wouldn't send any sensitive pictures over WhatsApp then.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#165
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#167
post #6

I find the outages of the last few days a curious coincidence : Slack, Google, Cloudflare, Azure, now FB. edit : added Slack after @kache_ mentioned it, added Azure after stevehubertron mentioned it.

All of my VPS servers have been slammed in the last 5 days with bruteforce SSH attacks. I've never seen anything this aggressive. One of my servers got PWNed, which has never happened to me before. There's definitely some wild, shady shit going on.

I highly recommend installing fail2ban to automatically firewall IPs with consecutive failed attempts, or if possible, disable password authentication altogether and use key auth.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#168
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's emergencies only and you get compensated handsomely many people will feel it's worth it. Of course reality often looks different.

depends on how you value your vacation time with family/friends/to yourself.

In my experience, people jostle to take part in a rotating on-call roster where they are sufficiently compensated, in my case $1700/week, to occasionally answer one or two calls.

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a large enough market for a "decentralized cloud" along the lines of IPFS but for compute. And, yknow, actually working decently. Something where you could pay compute/storage operators for resources and also be a server host and share your excess compute power.

This is effectively the idea behind the Ethereum blockchain model. You can make "smart contracts" (think APIs with persistent state) using languages like Solidity[1] and deploy them onto the blockchain. After that, you can invoke individual functions by paying "gas" (small amounts of ETH) that goes to the node operator's account. Smart contracts also get their own blockchain addresses, so they're capable of sending a…

I always wondered about this, so how do projects like CryptoKitties profit? Or do they give themselves the seed cryptocollectibles and profit off of those?

Re: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages

#170
post #85

Imagine if this meant not being able to send or receive currency.

Has there ever been a major bitcoin or ethereum, or stellar outage?

This is basically the point of decentralized systems. Foor bitcoin to work it relies by protocol on whoever is online, so effectively everyone using it would have to go offline for it to fail. Additionally, bitcoin really doesn't get updates that would dramatically change how things function enough for their to be an error introduced that would take things down. In comparison, FB and friends rely on a handful of servers that typically can be taken out by one poorly planned software upgrade.

This is a gross simplification, but the basic idea is that more servers and diversity of the servers (which you get from decentralised protocols) should lead to crashes not taking out the whole network.

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