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Facebook Down?

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Re: Facebook Down?

#161

How on earth does EVERYTHING go down like this? It just seems unfathomable to me. Where is the single point of failure?

How does it stay up as much as it does :)

"And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants."[1]

1. https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Re: Facebook Down?

#163

Likely not related, but you can imagine that they are quite busy these days with two unplanned projects: 1. Retooling the underpinnings of their ad analytics to survive iOS14. Big advertisers are about to lose a lot of their insights into attribution, partially directly related to the new limitations of iOS14, and partially due to assumptions that Facebook had made about tracking and which are no longer accurate and…

Perhaps some security patches after the data leak? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26691868

Re: Facebook Down?

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an intern can bring down the whole presence of your company online it's not the intern who is dumb.

While that's perfectly true, I'm sure a smart and determined intern could cause an astonishing amount of damage in many many orgs. Hopefully not at Facebook though.

The difference is whether or not it was intentional. If someone can bring everything down accidentally, the system is broken.

Ditto if they can bring it down intentionally and cover their tracks so no one finds out who did it.

Re: Facebook Down?

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The global outage drinking game: bad DNS config push - 1 shot routing loop - 2 shots third party advertising your routes - 3 shots power outage at data centre it turns out everything depends on despite decades and millions in engineering to avoid precisely that - 4 shots Wolves ate through fiber - 5 shots And it was a full moon - 6 shots Single service failure, but service has not been restarted in 5 years, and no lo…

You forgot: Hunter shot your fiber relay with a hunting rifle - 6 shots

6 shots? It only needed one.

Re: Facebook Down?

#167

How on earth does EVERYTHING go down like this? It just seems unfathomable to me. Where is the single point of failure?

The global outage drinking game: bad DNS config push - 1 shot routing loop - 2 shots third party advertising your routes - 3 shots power outage at data centre it turns out everything depends on despite decades and millions in engineering to avoid precisely that - 4 shots Wolves ate through fiber - 5 shots And it was a full moon - 6 shots Single service failure, but service has not been restarted in 5 years, and no lo…

5 is often broken down to “rain fade” and “backhoe fade.”

My favorite can’t-restart story is “the shared password manager is down, we need a hardware crypto key to restart it, the key is in the safe, and the safe’s combination was in the shared password manager.”

Re: Facebook Down?

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that size of a company there's usually blast radius restrictions and per-role permissions. I don't expect anyone has enough rights to "delete Facebook" on their own.

I guarantee you that there are 100+ people who could take Facebook down for 24+ hours if they went rogue. For example the people responsible for the bootup scripts of Facebook infra could sneak in a "0 0 1 * * /bin/rm -rf ${TEMPDIR}/*" into crontab... They'd set the commit message as "clear out temp monthly" and it would get deployed across the entire fleet till in the first of next month every disk at Facebook gets…

How though? Every past author of that script would be notified of such a change. It'd be insane if all of them would pretend they didn't see it and accept that change.

Re: Facebook Down?

#169
We're obviously going to take this opportunity to dunk of facebook because it's funny, but let's not forget that there are some valuable cultural assets that facebook hosts, with groups such as "Foods with threatening auras" and "Animals in predicaments."

I long ago tamed the facebook engagement algorithm by simply unfollowing everything and everyone except these legitimate, useful types of entertainment venues.

Re: Facebook Down?

#170

How on earth does EVERYTHING go down like this? It just seems unfathomable to me. Where is the single point of failure?

The global outage drinking game: bad DNS config push - 1 shot routing loop - 2 shots third party advertising your routes - 3 shots power outage at data centre it turns out everything depends on despite decades and millions in engineering to avoid precisely that - 4 shots Wolves ate through fiber - 5 shots And it was a full moon - 6 shots Single service failure, but service has not been restarted in 5 years, and no lo…

Don't forget cosmic rays!
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