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Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

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241–250 of 280 posts

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#241

It's been 20+ years since I had reason to know the internals of BGP, but I still carry a slight nervousness whenever I think about it. In many ways, it's beautiful in that it allows Autonomous Systems to come together and independently make the Internet. However, I always felt it was brittle in that it relied every AS to have edge routers aware of the entire AS routing map, and so when those routers went down hard, w…

>Like I said, it's been a while since I last looked closely, and I imagine multiple improvements have been made in this space since that time

For anyone that's interested in what these may be. Take a peak at MANRS. https://www.manrs.org/

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#242
post #224

It's been 20+ years since I had reason to know the internals of BGP, but I still carry a slight nervousness whenever I think about it. In many ways, it's beautiful in that it allows Autonomous Systems to come together and independently make the Internet. However, I always felt it was brittle in that it relied every AS to have edge routers aware of the entire AS routing map, and so when those routers went down hard, w…

So much of the internet is about translating addresses from one format to another: Human readable to IP: DNS Private IP to Public IP: NAT MAC to Private IP: ARP Public IP to AS: BGP With a block chain DNS it may be possible to replace all of them with a single protocol, but it may well turn out to be an academic exercise.

> So much of the internet is about translating addresses from one format to another

Most of computing is about mapping A to B and maintaining databases of those mappings :-)

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so no playing oculus either?

My friends said they couldn't play Oculus

I read on Facebook that Nicki Minaj's Cousin's Friend was using an Oculus during the Facebook outage, and he got trapped in CyberSpace, and when his balls became swollen in CyberSpace, they also became swollen in real life!

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#244
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty much why during the downtime visit instagram.com showed a 503 from AWS instead.

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

probably a testimony to the cost of aws lock-in

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friends said they couldn't play Oculus

I read on Facebook that Nicki Minaj's Cousin's Friend was using an Oculus during the Facebook outage, and he got trapped in CyberSpace, and when his balls became swollen in CyberSpace, they also became swollen in real life!

That's what you get when you try to get 100% in a Starfleet drill assessment simulation. A rigged one at that!

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to make it any more complex than "facebook, the company, messed up, now their properties are broken". An overly elaborated analogy just makes you sound condescending.

don't think the parents (target audience) would think he sounds condescending.

Just use the industry standard car analogy instead :-)

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#247
Lets assume somebody messed up their BGP config. Does anybody know if they use Juniper? Why they would not do the changes via "the commit confirmed" option?

The idea is you do something, you messed up and are locked out, the system will revert to previous config after a few minutes by itself. The story of people physically accessing systems only makes sense, if this was a hack...

===============

Commit Confirmed

"Suppose that despite all your efforts to insure your new configuration is correct before you commit it, something is overlooked and when you commit, you are locked out of the router."

"Rather than just a simple commit, you can make the candidate configuration active with a commit confirmed command. With this command, the router waits 10 minutes for a second commit. If it does not receive that confirming command within those 10 minutes, the router automatically does a rollback and commit so that the previous configuration becomes active again."

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2345600/managing-a-juno...

"Committing a Configuration"

https://www.juniper.net/documentation/us/en/software/junos/c...

===============

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#248

How can you explain yesterday's outage (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to your parents? You are feeling hungry and went to food court. The food court (open area) has a lot of options. You sit down in front of Domino's (Facebook), since you want to eat garlic bread. Now, you can't order from the counter directly. The waiter will come to your seat and ask for the order. You ordered garlic bread from the waiter, but the…

Analogies serve to confuse half the audience and make the other half go "actually it's more like .."

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#249

How can you explain yesterday's outage (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to your parents? You are feeling hungry and went to food court. The food court (open area) has a lot of options. You sit down in front of Domino's (Facebook), since you want to eat garlic bread. Now, you can't order from the counter directly. The waiter will come to your seat and ask for the order. You ordered garlic bread from the waiter, but the…

How about this:

Mum, dad - you know how I always tell you to turn your stuff off and on again?

Well, by turning it off, Facebook also turned off the On Button.

Re: Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet

#250
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.

You would think those in charge of security would know better with their mid-six figure salaries. But then again these days they stopped hiring based on merit but rather certain other “metrics” no wonder they were so incompetent...

was not them. was an intern.
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