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Re: undefined

#111

Post by gabyar »

jimsimmons wrote: post #98
wly_cdgr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we met, we lived on opposite coasts. I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the hundreds of other frie…

Proof by anecdote

Not a proof. But a useful anecdote.

No one is doing large scales studies of how many people meet their partner on FB, so anecdote is all we have for that.

Most of the criticisms are also anecdotes, but you seem fine with those.

Re: undefined

#112

Post by Bud »

EGreg wrote: post #71
paganel wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're not the only one, I noticed the same thing. In fact, immediately after reading and checking that FB is up I came back to the HN tab, reload it and it was way faster compared to a few minutes ago when FB was still down.

Telegram was down for me too WhatsApp is still down Something else is actually going on…

That doesn't mean something else is going on. It means that there are a lot of us who are web addicts who were temporarily deprived of our Zucker-smack and desperately flailed about in the rest of the web for a fix until our main dose got restored.

As for WhatsApp, that is of course a FB property.

Re: undefined

#113

Post by paxys »

drusepth wrote: post #89
paxys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one will definitely see the light of day considering how big a deal it is. Shareholders could easily sue over it.

What makes you think shareholders could sue over this outage without knowing the cause?

They could sue over Facebook not telling them the cause

Re: undefined

#114

Post by literallyaduck »

GrifMD wrote: post #36

I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing good lasts forever" I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.

The public is tired of being gaslighted and lied to by large corporations.

The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity.

Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is good.

Purposefully pitting people against each other, human experimentation https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook... , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is bad.

The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the public would be a gift to many addicts.

Re: undefined

#115

Post by whimsicalism »

GrifMD wrote: post #36

I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing good lasts forever" I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still this is pretty low effort.

Interesting how low quality comments seem to be correlated with FB going down :)

Re: undefined

#116

Post by PeterCorless »

jeffbee wrote: post #33

So, experts, someone explain why it would take half a day to advertise your routes. What did they need to do?

1. Get physical access to the systems; employee badges were also offline, so they needed to bring in a different set of people with physical access to the premises.

2. Login directly to their systems and update the A-name record.

3. A-name records do not take effect immediately. There's a propagation delay as other DNS services accept the domain name.

4. Any sort of "damage assessment" to check the conditions of the now-offline systems. [Not a gating factor; you can turn things on, but you are likely doing "blast radius" analysis in parallel.]

5. Restart services one-by-one. Web servers, databases, API gateways, etc.

6. Allow external access; turn the systems back on for the world. [This is where they are currently, even though some parts of Facebook do not seem to be working too well. i.e., uploads and new posts seem broken still; at least they were for me.]

Re: undefined

#117

Post by asciimov »

spike021 wrote: post #100
boplicity wrote: post #22

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

I think people could really work on self-curating/self-filtering content to make sure it's mostly what they want to see on social media. I've made nearly a dozen friends in Japan who I've now met there on two separate trips purely through a shared interest by connecting on Instagram. I rarely see content that I don't expect or care to see.

The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't have the granularity to block their political posts while still being able to see their regular posts.

Re: undefined

#119

Post by reilly3000 »

jeffbee wrote: post #33

So, experts, someone explain why it would take half a day to advertise your routes. What did they need to do?

Not an expert, but I have some theories:

1. Since all internal comms runs through email, messenger, and other systems all run under facebook.com, communication and coordination must have been extremely difficult.

2. eBGP servers/appliances that can serve 3 billion users must take a while to spin up. Assuming there was no cache, it would have to register thousands of internal services.

3. Per a now deleted reddit thread, the people who pushed the change and knew how to fix it weren't able to be onsite at the data center, so they were flying blind and working with lower level techs trying to implement their instructions.

4. DNS is usually heavily cached at multiple layers, but today they were getting DDOS'ed with DNS requests from FB clients. They would probably have to block those requests while the service is coming online so it doesn't just melt down again, and have some method of slowly allowing requests. How? IDK. Maybe host by host.

5. Whatever the case, some of the world's most sophisticated, highest paid engineers were under the gun to solve at $3000/second problem. I have to assume they were working as fast as they could.

Re: undefined

#120

Post by rconti »

fleddr wrote: post #103
boplicity wrote: post #22

During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.

It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family, with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people. The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook. I should add that I'm not from the US.

100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.

To me, it's the difference between default private and default public. On both platforms you can curate your content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook because it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also means it doesn't have to find its way to you.

Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior, I'd agree with that one for sure.

But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade, it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and utterly wrong.

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