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Meta outage

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Re: Meta outage

#671

Post by ceejayoz »

rimunroe wrote: post #664
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 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. Yes? That's how all top-level reporting is going to work. It's not going to tell you which part of your service is inaccessible. It's just telling you that people can't access it. You obviously have to do additional investigation to…

> It's not going to tell you which part of your service is inaccessible.

Scroll up the thread a bit; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39605354

Even here on HN, where people should know better, people take its incorrect attribution as useful info. TikTok isn't down. X isn't down. Google isn't down.

Re: Meta outage

#672

Post by sigil »

KMag wrote: post #645
jonnycomputer wrote: post #6

It logged me out and told me that my credentials were incorrect; I thought my credentials had been stolen, so I'm kinda personally glad that it seems to be happening to a lot of other people too. I know that's a bit selfish, but :shrug:

Yea, the wife came to me in a bit of a panic that her Facebook account got hacked. I tried logging in to FB to check if I had been unfriended, and I also got errors indicating my password was incorrect. My FB password is 96 bits from /dev/urandom in a GPG-based password manager I wrote for myself a couple decades ago. So, no my password wasn't wrong, and I'm not a big enough target for someone to put enough effort in…

> My FB password is 96 bits from /dev/urandom in a GPG-based password manager I wrote for myself a couple decades ago.

We have the same approach to password management!

Re: Meta outage

#673

Post by ldoughty »

rimunroe wrote: post #551
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.

> 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 the source of the reports and display of the reporting.

I'd trust Down Detector a lot more if it was filled with Hacker News community -- people who are able to understand that there's "DNS" and "Routing".. and that your phone can have internet access at home while your home PC does not.

I personally hate Down Detector's graphing because it can make it 'look' like there's an issue when there isn't really... Facebook with 500,000 reports looked as down as Google with 1,000 reports... For equally sized / used entities, I would not trust that "Google" is down with 1,000 reports. I had a coworker ask me what was going on with the internet because "everything is down.. Facebook, google, gmail, microsoft!" (when seeing the Down Detector home page)

DD should normalize the graphs against the service history in some way. A service shouldn't spike because it had 30 reports / hour for a day, then suddenly has 100... when it has a history of being out with 100,000+ reports. The 100 reports are probably mis-reporting, but you can't tell until you dig into each service, one by one, with separate page loads.

Re: Meta outage

#674

Post by seppel »

Kalium wrote: post #365
mfrommil wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A much better UX would be clear error messaging informing users that the service is down and there is no problem with their individual account. This would prevent people from panicking they've been hacked and/or unnecessarily resetting their password.

You are absolutely correct. That would be a much better experience. That said, getting there strikes me as pretty challenging. Automatically detecting a down state is difficult and any detection is inevitably both error-prone and only works for things people have thought of to check for. The more complex the systems in question, the greater the odds of things going haywire. At Meta's scale, that is likely to be nearl…

> That said, getting there strikes me as pretty challenging. Automatically detecting a down state is difficult and any detection is inevitably both error-prone and only works for things people have thought of to check for. The more complex the systems in question, the greater the odds of things going haywire. At Meta's scale, that is likely to be nearly a daily event.

Well, in principle, the frontend just has to distinguish between HTTP status 500 (something broken in the backend, not the fault of the user) and some HTTP status code 4xx (the user did something wrong).

Re: Meta outage

#677

Post by shadowgovt »

shkkmo wrote: post #562
mns wrote: 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…

You can't plan for every contigency, but you can reserve potentially scary message for situations where you know they are correct. An unpected error state should NOT result in a "invalid credentialiald error".

This is the nature of credentials errors. The more information you give, the more you're telling an untrusted and therefore assumed-hostile agent.

I hate it because it's bad UX, but that's the thinking behind it.

Re: Meta outage

#678

Post by YeBanKo »

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 could not play a steam game on a PC in offline mode when my internet was down. This issue is not exclusive to fb.

Re: Meta outage

#679

Post by EscargotCult »

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.

Their outage heatmap is also basically a population density map too. https://xkcd.com/1138/

Re: Meta outage

#680

Post by cmpxchg8b »

kome wrote: post #489
btbuildem wrote: post #440

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

Enough for Meta to be a $1.2 Trillion company. What a silly comment.
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