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Meta outage

metastatus.com

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Re: Meta outage

#631

Post by tzs »

jon-wood wrote: post #374
DeusExMachina wrote: post #281

Looking at the Downdetector home page [1], it looks like many more services are having outages, not just the ones owned by Meta, including: - Google - YouTube - Google Play - T-Mobile - X (Twitter) - Discord - TikTok - Pokemon Go - Snapchat It looks like they all have the same failure point. [1] https://downdetector.com

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.

YouTube was definitely doing something weird that doesn't seem likely connected to Facebook.

A couple hours ago after watching a video I went to my home page, which usually shows recommendations based on what I've recently watched plus a few videos labeled as sponsored that have nothing to do with any of my interests.

Instead everything on the home page was either a sponsored video, or a movie that was free to view with ads, or something from one of their music products.

I tried from an incognito window to see if it had something to do with being logged in. Normally going incognito loses the history-based recommendations but at least recommends user uploaded content. But now it has just like my logged in home page. No user content. Just ads and videos from Google's movie and music services.

Refreshing gave an error that said something went wrong. I then logged in on that page and again got something went wrong. Another refresh got a page with some user content. Another refresh was the ads and Google stuff page.

A little later it seemed to clear up and now my home page is back to normal.

Re: Meta outage

#632

Post by plorkyeran »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #173
_yb2s wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It amazes me how most smartphone apps- which operate in a wireless environment of likely flaky connections, don't seem to be tested or designed at all to handle loss of connections. They tend to just become non-responsive or do erroneous things like play the first second of an audio file and then auto-pause, without reporting any errors.

These 1 percent of edge cases take so much effort to test and handle though.

A smartphone having a flakey internet connection isn't an edge case.

Re: Meta outage

#633

Post by jordanthoms »

consumer451 wrote: post #621
jon-wood wrote: post #374

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.

> Or people are using Facebook Auth for them. Gmail is also on the list. You can't use FB auth to login to Gmail, can you?

Gmail was also experiencing issues: https://www.google.com/appsstatus/dashboard/incidents/shD5Vv...

Re: Meta outage

#634

Post by ceejayoz »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #627
ceejayoz wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't listening for spikes in complaints about outages a great way to detect them? When there's a major ISP outage, people report problems with all the major sites. When Facebook's down, people report problems with any site that has "Login with Facebook" as an option. It's almost never actually an outage impacting all of FAANG at once.

> When Facebook's down, people report problems with any site that has "Login with Facebook" as an option. If users log into your site with Facebook, then the login functionality of your site effectively is down when "Login with Facebook" is down. From the user's perspective, your subcontractors, including authentication subcontractors, are a problem for you to deal with and never show them. From your perspective, you…

> If users log into your site with Facebook, then the login functionality of your site effectively is down when "Login with Facebook" is down.

There are plenty of sites where "Login with Facebook" is a convenience but hardly the only way to log in. Reddit, for example, has "Login with Google" and "Login with Apple"; it would be highly misleading to claim "Reddit is down" if Google's OAuth flow was having an outage.

> educating them with a good error message might help

Nothing in the API or OAuth flow would make that doable in an automatic fashion with this outage. It'd have to be something you put up manually as a banner after hearing of the outage.

> Or you could remove the Facebook login option, if you (totally reasonably) don't want Facebook's failures to reflect poorly on you.

I don't particualrly care; we're talking about why DownDetector isn't necessarily ideal for assessing. It can be a useful signal, in some scenarios, but I've seen plenty of spurious signals come from it.

Re: Meta outage

#635

Post by pixl97 »

sandspar wrote: post #572
Kalium wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the scale of Meta, "down" is a nuanced concept. You are very unlikely to get every piece of functionality seizing up at once. What you are likely to get is some services ceasing to function and other services doing error-handling. For example, if the service that authenticates a user stops working but the service that shows the login form works, then you get a complex interaction. The resulting messaging - and thu…

Slightly unrelated question, but just how "Big" is Meta? I know it's vast, but as an outsider I have trouble grokking the scale of it.

When most people talk about serving thousands and maybe millions of requests per second, Meta talks about billions of requests per second.

https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-facebook-scaled-memcac...

Re: Meta outage

#636

Post by jeanlucas »

nayuki wrote: post #561

Note that this web page only covers the status of Meta's offerings for business users. This doesn't track the downtime of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc. as normal users experience them.

Curiously, WhatsApp did not suffer an outage in Brazil.

Re: Meta outage

#637

Post by [deleted] »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #281

Looking at the Downdetector home page [1], it looks like many more services are having outages, not just the ones owned by Meta, including: - Google - YouTube - Google Play - T-Mobile - X (Twitter) - Discord - TikTok - Pokemon Go - Snapchat It looks like they all have the same failure point. [1] https://downdetector.com

[deleted]

Re: Meta outage

#638

Post by tonymet »

DeusExMachina wrote: post #281

Looking at the Downdetector home page [1], it looks like many more services are having outages, not just the ones owned by Meta, including: - Google - YouTube - Google Play - T-Mobile - X (Twitter) - Discord - TikTok - Pokemon Go - Snapchat It looks like they all have the same failure point. [1] https://downdetector.com

Facebook audience is in the billions, so you will see 100k false positives when a big site like that goes down.

Re: Meta outage

#640

Post by idle_zealot »

fmsf wrote: post #292

I was considering buying the Quest 3 this morning, this outage is timely. The fact that I can't use my perfectly working headset to play an offline game because facebook is down, makes me wonder if I should go for a different provider. Any recommendations? Excluding apple vision pro since it is too expensive.

I can confirm that I was unable to use my Quest 3 this morning. I left it connected to the internet, it tried to phone home I guess, and then locked itself into a "please connect this headset to your Meta account" state.

I am so sick of companies "selling" computers that they continue to control. In what universe does Meta have the right to remotely lock my headset and prevent me from using it to run the software I installed on it? If I were to sell my current desktop computer, or phone, or whatever, on any marketplace, and leave a remote login account on it that I then used to continue to operate the computer as though it were mine remotely, installing software, playing games, and occasionally peeking at what the current owner was doing, that would be obviously criminal. How is this any different? Because I signed away my rights when I "agreed" to their Terms and Conditions box (which I was compelled to do to use the hardware I purchased)?

Something is so fundamentally broken in the current ownership/property landscape. We somehow ended up in a world where people don't own the most critical tools in their lives, companies have managed to recreate feudal fiefdoms within the bounds of the market.

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