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FB JavaScript SDK down

developers.facebook.com

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Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#11

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

dylan604 wrote: post #7
MivLives wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The link the op used is to specific issue complaint thread. At the present time 3:37 EST the only communication from an official facebook responder is: Hi John, Thanks for reaching out. We are aware of this issue and are currently working on fixing it. I'll update this thread when I have more information from the team. Thank you for your patience. Regards, Fatma The rest is a bunch of people complaining of the same i…

If it has been down that long and that's the only official response, then things must be pretty bad. Either the situation, or FB's communication skills. Neither is good for FB's users, er, products.

It was most likely looked at by the Dublin/Europe team, and passed to SF without a resolution. But yeah, it's super bad, especially on a Friday.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#12

Post by aboringusername »

It's funny to me. A while back there was a thread on HN about the SDK going hay-wire and taking apps down with it. I sometimes wonder how much damage (financially, technically and socially) a single "shutdown" command can cause.

Seems developers don't bother to test/handle certain failure scenario. Because this API or this server will be available until the heat death of the universe and will never fail.

Also shows FB can, at will, essentially DDOS entire apps just by causing a few failures. Quite a nice position to be in for...Leverage should we say? :P

P.S and a tip to devs:

Please test your apps to enure if a third party component dies, your entire site isn't useless without it. It's okay having "stripe" as the gateway for your entire business to make money but you're essentially putting all your eggs in their basket.

Also, if you use third party JS scripts (caching providers), test that if something isn't loaded you have a fallback (perhaps a locally served version, just do that anyway). It's amazing how a script request just doesn't work and well...Your entire site/app is now dead.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#13

Post by mrweasel »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #6

after having been involved in multiple products that relied on facebook, i would not be surprised if this was just their way to let developers know they discontinued the sdk. But don't worry they write a blog post when they bring out the successor in a few months.

I don't know or use the Facebook SDK, but would it be possible to simply disable it and continue running, but without the features it provides?

Previously I've used Google Tag Manager to simply disable external Javascript service when they went down. It saved us multiple time, because we worked with small service providers who doesn't really know anything about the internet, but also in two cases where AWS was unavailable. Rather than having to do a code change and a redeployment, we could just disable a 3. party temporarily.

Maybe the Facebook SDK is typically integrated to deeply to be something you can just disable. It the other comments are correct, and it's down frequently, then maybe you should design to run without it, even if it's just for short periods of time.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#16

Post by capableweb »

mrweasel wrote: post #13
jFriedensreich wrote: post #6

after having been involved in multiple products that relied on facebook, i would not be surprised if this was just their way to let developers know they discontinued the sdk. But don't worry they write a blog post when they bring out the successor in a few months.

I don't know or use the Facebook SDK, but would it be possible to simply disable it and continue running, but without the features it provides? Previously I've used Google Tag Manager to simply disable external Javascript service when they went down. It saved us multiple time, because we worked with small service providers who doesn't really know anything about the internet, but also in two cases where AWS was unavai…

> I don't know or use the Facebook SDK, but would it be possible to simply disable it and continue running, but without the features it provides?

The beauty (or ugly, for some) of JS is that it depends on how you use it. If you just call the initialize function (which seems to be down, somehow?) of the FB SDK in the top scope of your page, all code below it is invalid. If you're including it as a script, that script will fail. If it's in a response to some onload event, the rest of the onload body will not execute either.

Not to say you should always expect errors from any 3rd party libraries unless you can guarantee it won't throw, that's just basic error handling.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#18

Post by LordOfWolves »

It’s too bad the core website didn’t go down with it. I believe the majority of users, at least those in the USA where FB is based, would be better off without it.

A week-long FB outage would surely result in a very interesting study of society’s response and adaptation to said event.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#19

Post by maxpert »

LordOfWolves wrote: post #18

It’s too bad the core website didn’t go down with it. I believe the majority of users, at least those in the USA where FB is based, would be better off without it. A week-long FB outage would surely result in a very interesting study of society’s response and adaptation to said event.

People will only discover they can live without FB like I did. Never came back to self glorification platform.

Re: FB JavaScript SDK down

#20

Post by neura »

schneidmaster wrote: post #9
frob wrote: post #4

By my count from the status page[0], the FB JS SDK has had issues for 30 of the past 90 days. That's not even one 9. [0] https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/

Most of the issues on that dashboard don't seem related to the JS SDK, e.g. "Increased latency on marketing insights API" and "Instagram comments webhooks event delivery traffic drop". It's a blended view of every(?) Facebook developer product but you'd usually calculate 9's for each individual product.

The problem here is that the JS SDK encompasses all of their products. They don't have a different script or bundle to download for each thing. You just configure your code to point to their JS SDK url, with some params for which version you want, how you want to use it (xml, json), if it should use cookies or some other tracking method. Then it sends you what they think you need based on those params along with your app id so they can see your app configuration, all in one bundle.

This makes it very complicated to say what is actually down or unavailable, which is why I'm guessing the status is "degraded performance", not "down" and they're not calling it an "outage", because technically other parts of the SDK are completely unaffected.

To say that anything in particular is down, they'd have to list a set of API endpoints that are down or a set of very specific features. This is to their advantage though as [1] as already noted, they don't have to say that their SDK is "down", since it's technically not and [2] other people are still going to argue that "hey, it's up for me".

End result, they don't really care how anybody else feels about it. What are people going to do, move to another platform? Stop using facebook to generate traffic and thus revenue? :eye_roll:

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