Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 280 posts

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#121

Post by MrStonedOne »

Ansil849 wrote: post #89
dirkg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are they 'interjecting' themselves? They run a massively popular dns service as well as many other sites, and they are simply reporting on what happened and why people who use their dns etc might have had outages. In addition to being a very detailed and well written article on the whole incident. Not really sure what you are driving at.

> Not really sure what you are driving at. At the fact that they are presenting themselves as authorities on the incident, when they have no internal knowledge of what triggered the events, because they are not Facebook engineers. They provide an explanation of BGP that you can glean by reading virtually any other introductory explainer, and turn it into a chance to promote their own service.

>At the fact that they are presenting themselves as authorities on the incident, when they have no internal knowledge of what triggered the events, because they are not Facebook engineers. They provide an explanation of BGP that you can glean by reading virtually any other introductory explainer, and turn it into a chance to promote their own service.

This is not an honest representation of the article.

They talk about what their services observed related to bgp traffic from facebook. They are an authority on that.

They talk about their dns traffic changes from facebook's outage. They are an authority on that.

They talk about suspected causes, based on the observable data, and guess what, given they are who they are, this is something they are a subject matter expert on.

"we saw a spike in bgp traffic from facebook followed by a bunch of route withdrawals. we think this could be a bgp configuration issue [given we took large chunks of the internet down 2 years via the same fuckup]"

Is something in the subject matter wheelhouse of cloudflare, yes.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#122

Post by MrStonedOne »

Ansil849 wrote: post #72

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 talk about what their services observed related to bgp traffic from facebook. They are an authority on that.

They talk about their dns traffic changes from facebook's outage. They are an authority on that.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#123

Post by Godel_unicode »

hinkley wrote: post #100
Ansil849 wrote: post #72

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…

Given that warp is a pretty major player in the VPN space and lots of their customers are likely to blame them for not being able to get to Facebook, I think having a detailed "wasn't us" on their blog that their sales engineers can point to is reasonable.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#125

Post by ksaj »

zanethomas wrote: post #78

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)

It wouldn't be the first time it's happened, and you would expect their network and security folk to understand single points of failure.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#126

Post by Lazare »

Ansil849 wrote: post #72

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 are essentially doing glorified bikeshedding, and providing an explainer of how BGP works that can be gleaned by reading virtually any introductory text on it, and using it as a marketing opportunity.

I mean, I'm not really sure what the purpose of a corporate blog is except that? You make posts about whatever will garner attention in order to get some views, maybe spread some information, and - of course - turn it into a marketing opportunity. That's the job, no?

> Is anyone else kinda put off by how Cloudflare keeps interjecting themselves into this situation?

Personally? No. Although amusingly, a non-technical friend of mine took the twitter posts they made as a sign that Cloudflare had caused the outage somehow, so it's certainly possible there's a risk there.

And from one of your other comments:

> Next time Cloudflare's CDN eats itself and starts vomiting up private customer data, Facebook can do a blogpost titled 'Understanding how Cloudflare exposed the private information of untold numbers of its customers'.

Yes, they should totally do that (at least if they have anything informative to contribute, as I think Cloudflare does here). Why would this be a bad thing, or a reason not to talk about Facebook's issues? And I mean, at one point today something like 6+ of the top 10 links on HN were about Facebook, so I mean, everyone else is talking about them. Why not Cloudflare? And if and when Cloudflare has their next big issue, everyone will be talking about them either way.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#127

Post by bikeshaving »

Ansil849 wrote: post #85
rjvir wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

> I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it. You kinda inadvertently highlighted the issue: because they had nothing to do with it, they do not know what actually happened. They can pontificate about likely causes, just like others in the industry can, but they have no idea what actually caused the issue.

At no point in the blog post did they offer any conjecture about what was happening at Facebook. All of their information was general descriptions of DNS and BGP, or descriptions of how the Facebook outage was experienced on their end from running a DNS resolver. That in and of itself makes for an interesting and informative perspective.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#128

Post by Godel_unicode »

Ansil849 wrote: post #85
rjvir wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

> I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it. You kinda inadvertently highlighted the issue: because they had nothing to do with it, they do not know what actually happened. They can pontificate about likely causes, just like others in the industry can, but they have no idea what actually caused the issue.

If you read the blog post, you'll see that it's speculation-free facts about what happened. BGP announcements happened at time t, DNS started failing at t+n, DNS requests spiked, BGP updates happened at t', DNS returned to normal at t'+n.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#129

Post by dfdz »

Ansil849 wrote: post #85
rjvir wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

> I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it. You kinda inadvertently highlighted the issue: because they had nothing to do with it, they do not know what actually happened. They can pontificate about likely causes, just like others in the industry can, but they have no idea what actually caused the issue.

I assume you did not read the blog post? It’s just a technical post describing the outage from Cloudflare’s perspective and mostly focuses on the increased traffic to 1.1.1.1 and the latency it caused

You can pontificate about likely contents of Cloudfare’s blog post, just like others who did not read it, but clearly you have no idea what it actually contains

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#130

Post by bagfish »

rjvir wrote: post #79
Ansil849 wrote: post #72

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…

It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.

But they did have something to do with it, and were impacted by the situation - the parent post of this traffic is a world of devices DDoSing DNS services, one of which Cloudflare owns and operates.
Post reply on HN