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Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

blog.cloudflare.com

101–110 of 280 posts

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#101

Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it. Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing gl…

They've done this in previous outages and people didn't like it then, either. Generally big companies don't talk smack about other big companies having internet-wide issues, unless those issues are directly caused by the other company. For instance, when Google talked about Cloudbleed, which was when Cloudflare vomited millions of secrets all over Google's caching heirarchy and Google had to manually clean it up. I t…

I still remember Cloudflare's PR efforts to downplay Cloudbleed. A key reason why I meticulously avoid using any of their services.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#102

Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it. Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing gl…

Cloudflare are also good at disappearing people from the Internet

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#103

All very amusing. But most amusing was that facebook employees' badges wouldn't work. Hilarious. Can't get in the office if facebook.com is not reachable. (or whatever the unreachable service was)

Ah, so no playing oculus either?

Curious about this as well could not find anything on initial searches but I honestly hope so. The one reason I have not grabbed the oculus is because the Facebook requirement.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#104

All very amusing. But most amusing was that facebook employees' badges wouldn't work. Hilarious. Can't get in the office if facebook.com is not reachable. (or whatever the unreachable service was)

Ah, so no playing oculus either?

Oculus customers were only able to play offline games during this time. Which I find concerning. I don't mind that FB employee badges didn't work because what would they do at their desks anyway and all exit doors have bypasses anyway so they can, and were, open, just rank and file employees couldn't access some spaces. Some of those spaces are secure and "fail closed" by design. Yes, its inconvenient but unlocking all the doors to potential terrorists or workplace shooters if the internet connection gets snipped isn't what you want in an office.

What's scary is that my gaming machine can't be used because of some weird obsession with centralizing oculus through facebook. As a customer that's inexcusable but now imagine a developer who hosts her own servers for her game and her customers can't get to it. Facebook is only providing middle-man authentication, its not even hosting these games. If they were hosted by FB it would be fine, but they aren't and what we're suffering under is FB being the gatekeeper to the rest of the internet. That is a scary prospect.

I also question why we all think its acceptable to have these incredible BGP outages every 3-6 months. We built our digital world on the equivalent of ever changing spinning plates and manage it in the most cost-efficient way possible. Maybe the alternative would been worse, but its crazy to me as to what we consider normal and acceptable in capitalist culture.

I'm already seeing /r/oculus say its no different than Valve's scheduled maintenance windows, which is obviously false. Its incredible what rationalizations we'll accept instead of questioning the status quo of capitalist culture and our giant corporations that rule so much of our lives.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder why they're still using AWS given that FB operates its own data centers...

No idea. I'd speculate that it's some kind of historical reasons from before FB acquired IG.

Could be that nobody thought to ask. If it was an oversight that'll be rectified shortly, now that everyone in the company knows about it.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#106
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Are you sure? Can people you need to recover from this change already in the building?”

Maybe a timed rollback with the previous state stored on the device that needs to be rolled back, althogh if you're doing this at facebook scale I'm sure that's a little more difficult than it sounds, perhaps.

Like the little dialog when you change your video settings.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#107

Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it. Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing gl…

No. I don’t mind at all. It’s a great marketing opportunity and they would be stupid not to take advantage of it.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so no playing oculus either?

Oculus customers were only able to play offline games during this time. Which I find concerning. I don't mind that FB employee badges didn't work because what would they do at their desks anyway and all exit doors have bypasses anyway so they can, and were, open, just rank and file employees couldn't access some spaces. Some of those spaces are secure and "fail closed" by design. Yes, its inconvenient but unlocking a…

There's been a few people so far whose Facebook accounts were banned that learnt this the hard way.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#109
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timezones are the most annoying thing... right after encoding

I personally find timezones more annoying. At least with encoding once you figure things out it will work indefinitely. Timezones can simply change from under you with or without notice.

Unicode 14 just came out. If you are using collation, NFD, ... you need to update your libs.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#110

Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation? First with the Twitter posts and now this blogpost. They're a passive observer, not involved in this event, and yet they keep putting themselves in the middle of it. Cloudflare staff are not Facebook staff, they do not know how things actually went down to trigger the events that transpired. They are essentially doing gl…

No. I don’t mind at all. It’s a great marketing opportunity and they would be stupid not to take advantage of it.

Totally. Just like it's weird that more cigarette companies don't advertise outside schools.
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