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Meta outage

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Re: Meta outage

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason we're also not talking about the ten million non-coincidences that didn't seem to happen today. It's a kind of survivorship bias that coincidences seem like they mean something. Or you could imagine it as this: your animal brain has evolved to notice patterns. Seeing coincidences like this is akin to seeing faces in the stars. The challenge of evolved being is to override those impulses when they're not l…

Sure. But if millions of evolved brains are "seeing the same pattern", they will behave as such, and so the meaning of that otherwise random noise in fact becomes something material.

And that’s why conspiracy nuts exist.

Re: Meta outage

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Down Detector is so unreliable. People that can't call an AT&T phone via Verizon will think (and report) that Verizon is down, when it's really AT&T. People can try logging in using Facebook's on click login and not be able to get in, so they think Tiktok is down. It's not all that useful. I hate when journalists cite it.

It's only slightly better than "my mom claims". My mom would ask if I had the internet at my house. Yup. all of it. in a rack in my bedroom closet. She'd also report the "internet is down" when a single website was having issues. To me, that is down detector carrying on the legacy of moms everywhere.

A single report on there is useless. A sudden flood of reports is a good sign that something interesting is happening.

Re: Meta outage

#603

Anyone have a good guesstimate of how much money is "lost" when Youtube/Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp (more?) are down each minute?

Naively, divide ad revenue by time to get a dollars-per-time. But thats naive because ad serving isn’t totally sold out so they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window. If the outage is short, then the impact is small. But some markets are totally sold out and there’s no making up for lost impressions.

> they can make up for it by increasing the density of ads in the next time window

Not only that but the bigger spenders will have more budget so the bidding after a large outage should return higher bids on average leading to increased profit per ad slot.

Re: Meta outage

#604
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could this be related to Google's log in page change? Seemed cosmetic only, but funny timing that Google's page update happens the same time all these log in issues pop up.

They've been previewing that change for weeks, and I wondered: why do they need to change it at all? Is it some product manager justifying his need to exist?

Based on their hype banners, I was ready for a major overhaul, too. Or at least something obviously different about the login flow. It sure looks like somebody just clicked the left-align button and spit-shined the typeface a tiny bit.

Which, I guess, is the best possible redesign: one that freshens up without rocking the boat.

Re: Meta outage

#605
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite some harsh comments here below. You can't plan for every possible failure point, who knows what part of a system/infra out of everything that they have went down and triggered this behaviour. Some things you just can't catch/predict. Especially in huge systems like theirs. I would expect people here to understand things like these and not just call people names for something like this, we all know thi…

This is a company with one of the largest digital infrastructures in the world. An outage is understandable, inability to tell they're having an outage and inform users appropriately is not. Stop making excuses for people who are literally awash in resources.

It is always better for the company's rep for the issue to have been on your end. Admitting fault comes with a potential liability. It's gaslighting written as an SLA

Re: Meta outage

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or people are using Facebook Auth for them. I don't really trust Down Detector, which despite the claims is really People Winging on Twitter Detector.

> I don't really trust Down Detector, which despite the claims is really People Winging on Twitter Detector. I'm confused. Isn't listening for spikes in complaints about outages a great way to detect them? I know for a fact some service companies monitor social media channels for this purpose (among others). I'd be surprised if that wasn't more or less standard practice. I've checked Down Detector for ISP outages in…

The problem is that people use FB login for other sites, and if FB login is down, many users report a problem with that other site, not with FB.

Re: Meta outage

#607

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It's real. Single core performance improves all the time. People overestimate how much power it takes to handle lots of queries per second on a well-tuned system and well-written software in 2024. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> People overestimate how much power it takes to handle lots of queries per second on a well-tuned system and well-written software in 2024. I wasn't overestimating anything, but with how easy it is to write concurrently software today, why limit your site to a single core.

Maybe it's a lisp thing. Who knows what mysteries lurk here

Re: Meta outage

#608
post #489

Hope it stays broken. Imagine? People would blink, confused, and slowly start to wake from a decade-long stupor.

how many people, realistically, use it daily? I think not a lot

>Facebook: global daily active users 2023.

>Statista https://www.statista.com › statistics › facebook-global-dau Feb 9, 2024 — During the fourth quarter of 2023, the number of daily active users on Facebook reached 2.1 billion, a minor increase on the previous quarter.

So roughly 28% of the planet.

Re: Meta outage

#609
post #540
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no consistent scale on that graph, so any local maxima of reports received would look similar to any other.

Exactly this. FB topped out around 520,000 reports. Google topped out around 1,400. That's a massive difference in scale. Both are above their baselines, but I bet some is just mis-reports, or increases in awareness due to more people checking in. Meta seems to be the only one really affected from what I can tell.

We saw a big spike in latency and failures on the Google OAuth apis starting at the same time (15:21 UTC)

Re: Meta outage

#610
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that's by design if you send an action request very quickly after a previous one. It's very easy to replicate. Open a post. Then click the upvote button and very quickly click the favorite button too. That will trigger it. I think it's used to rate limit.

>"Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly" is our little server process saying "help, I only have a single core and I'm out of breath here". If your account were rate limited it would say something like "You're posting too fast, please slow down." dang, linked in one of the ancestor comments. But I still suspect you are correct.

I just tested it by quickly upvoting your comment and then favoriting it and the error was:

> Sorry, we're not able to serve your requests this quickly. reload

Note that this only seems to happen for actions. Doesn't seem to be the case if I am just loading a page quickly.

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