Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#161

Post by paul7986 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:15 AM UTC

crmd wrote: post #115

14 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I hear Facebook leadership talking about the VR vision, I’m reminded of IBM in the early 2000s encouraging employees to claim their second life avatars and setup cyber customer briefing centers.

Exactly ... like I am going to strap on a headset and work with my co-workers memojis for 8 hours or even less. Laughable and VR has been around since the 90s with the same form factor .. it hasn't evolved as it will always be strap this bulky thing to your head & isolate yourself from the world. Maybe it will catch on for videogames but to co-work in a virtually reality world HA.

AR Glasses at least their form factor has changed since Google Glass and will continue to evolve some. Google Glasses to how Facebook Stories sunglasses look which look like sunglasses billions are use to wearing and use daily. Billions will never strap on a headset for hours to co-work. Billions will adopt AR Glasses as it takes a familiar form factor/daily life product and enhances it like the iPHone enhance our daily lives.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#162

Post by fighterpilot » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:16 AM UTC

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #156

jiocrag wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far fetched, obviously, but.... Jurassic Park, Dennis Nedry-type situation? Shut down the master systems to hide the theft (or in this case, destruction) of vital info. No key-card access means even non-need-to-know internal employees wouldn't see the deed, and plausible deniability is spawned for everyone else.

Considering they just had a whistle blower leak incriminating documents... I'd say this is plausible. Edit: Also a great way to suppress the news of the whistleblower. Take the site down so the outage outranks news searches keyword "Facebook"

The second explanation seems plausible to me. The first one is a bit farfetched since they could've just waited two weeks in order to make it look less suspicious given that the leak would not be front of mind for everyone by then.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#163

Post by tjpnz » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:22 AM UTC

nimbius wrote: post #64

throwdecro wrote: post #6

This is a great write-up, but one thing I don't understand is why the effect of withdrawing the BGP prefixes was instantaneous (if I understand that correctly), but it's taking hours (so far) to re-announce the prefixes. Why would it take so long to flip the switch back the other way?

Unpopular opinion but I think a talent exodus and turnover are likely at fault here as well. The people who stood up this juggernaut are no longer here, and Facebooks ability to consistently attract talent that is competent enough to maintain such a formidable beast is hampered by repetitive revelations that it operates at the net-loss of humanity as a whole. Facebooks no longer an innovator, just a mining operation…

I'm sure the people who go to work for Facebook are fully aware of what they're getting into.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#164

Post by Bluecobra » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:23 AM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #104

unityByFreedom wrote: post #94

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…

> I also question why we all think its acceptable to have these incredible BGP outages every 3-6 months.

This isn’t BGP’s fault, someone or something presumably made a network configuration change that took down their route advertisements to the world. There’s currently ~72K autonomous systems advertising ~900K IPv4 prefixes today on the Internet. There’s bound to be some sort of screw up once in a while.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#165

Post by rnd0 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:23 AM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #145

markus_zhang wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this? Curious about how they hire their 500k people.

The person you're replying to is insinuating that Facebook hires half-a-million dollar engineers based on diversity quotas instead of technical chops. No sense asking them to elaborate since they're obviously completely outside the company and have no worthwhile insight into their hiring practices.

"Diversity quota" is one interpretation, mine was that they meant FB hires were determined according to who you know and who you blow. (probably less of the latter post-#metoo)

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#166

Post by edoceo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:26 AM UTC

swayvil wrote: post #137

ksaj wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A single point of failure implies a single point of control. A dungeonmaster. There can be only one.

That was Highlander tho.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#167

Post by HenryKissinger » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #147

jiocrag wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far fetched, obviously, but.... Jurassic Park, Dennis Nedry-type situation? Shut down the master systems to hide the theft (or in this case, destruction) of vital info. No key-card access means even non-need-to-know internal employees wouldn't see the deed, and plausible deniability is spawned for everyone else.

"I'm sorry Senator. We lost that data in the Oct 4 incident."

"The Senate will decide your fate, Mr. Zuckerberg."

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#168

Post by NikolaNovak » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:34 AM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #114

NikolaNovak wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kinda see your perspective; but I also mostly view them similarly to e.g. BackBlaze blogs - sure it can be viewed as taking smack about Samsung and Seagate drives failing, but I seem them as "things fail; what can we learn from it / here's our observations". And yes a little bit of self-advertising, but again, most tech blogs are, one way or another.

It just comes off as crass. 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'.

Right, but as a consumer if that information, I might find that article equally interesting.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#169

Post by prawn » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

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…

How'd you feel about Krebs' post about the outage?

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#170

Post by Ansil849 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

prawn wrote: post #169

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…

How'd you feel about Krebs' post about the outage? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...

Krebs did not promote a DNS service he works for a total of nine times in his blogpost, so I did not feel like I was reading an infomercial for how great Cloudflare's continued MITMing of the internet is.