probably some sort of BGP flood.
Meta outage
781–790 of 902 posts
Re: Meta outage
#782Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do you really think there are masses of people who can’t tell the difference between a single sign on service being down and individual sites being down and reporting it to downdetector? Have you never seen The Website Is Down? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE The answer is: way more people than a software developer might think. Ask anyone in IT, or go to anywhere bugs are reported and read a handful.
yeah that’s my point. No one who arranges icons by penis is taking time to go file a report on down detector.
Ahh, I see. In that case, most of DownDetectors data are from Twitter and other sources, not first party reporting, although even in the case of first party data, it is also sourced via "visits to DownDetector" which can be from a simple Google search for "is Instagram down?"
If DownDetector relied primarily on direct reporting, they'd be the last to know.
Re: Meta outage
#783Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pushing people to unnecessarily reset credentials increases risk. Not only does it increase acute risk, but it also decreases the value of the signal by crying wolf. The argument here is the kind of nonsense cargo cult security that pervades the industry.
I think this argument falls flat on two axes:
- in general, if the system is broken enough to be giving false-negatives on valid credentials, it's broken enough that there isn't much planning to be done here because the system's not supposed to break. So if they give me "Sorry, backend offline" instead of "invalid credential," they've now turned their system into an oracle for scanning it for queries-of-death. That's useful for an attacker.
- in the specifics of this situation, (a) credential reset was offline too so nobody could immediately rotate them anyway and (b) as a cohort, Facebook users could stand to rotate their credentials more often than the "never" that they tend to rotate them, so if this outage shook their faith enough that they changed their passwords after system health was restored... Good? I think "accidentally making everyone wonder if their Facebook password is secure enough" was a net-positive side-effect of this outage.
Re: Meta outage
#784every one panicked that they got hacked. i got a slim hope that i also got hacked and that i will not bother to recover my account and just roll without FB :) im too week to quit my self.
I tried logging in, I couldn't and was like "nice, I guess I want to have to look at garbage today".
I really would like a social network just for friends without all the garbage bloat.
Re: Meta outage
#785Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's also, you know, a foundation of behavioral economics. But either one, whatever.
Re: Meta outage
#786Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's not a Steam thing though, but rather the specific software. Steam explicitly has an exit path for the user if Valve disappeared overnight that allows their downloaded games to continue working offline. The difference being that we are discussing platforms, not the things that run on those platforms.
Steam Offline wants you to go online and perform a bunch of steps, including launching games and then enabling offline mode. Every game launch is is probably a download of at least few hundred megabytes of data. And then every game requires its own networks where your account linked to steam acc, etc. and Rockstar games iirc it you must be online when you launch the game. So the fact that Steam client has offline mode is irrelevant and misleading.
Re: Meta outage
#787Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't Steam still offer an offline mode that works with most games?
Rockstar games require you to have an account at the launch iirc. And this us kind misleading, because while technically Steam has offline mode, but not necessarily the games you purchased on Steam. But having a unified UX is why I want to use the platform like steam to begin with.
Re: Meta outage
#788Earlier 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…
In the Twitter operations area there was a big TV that streamed searches for #failwhale etc. It was actually very useful to detect problems with Twitter by looking for people complaining about Twitter on Twitter.
Re: Meta outage
#789Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Indeed I haven't noticed any blip in functionality, but then again I don't ever do FB (or other external service) login. Absolutely no reason to do so, long term drawbacks are too serious to be lazy about this.
Re: Meta outage
#790Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's almost never actually an outage impacting all of FAANG at once. Exactly. If you click through down detector when things are _up_ you'll see people still complaining that $site is down. Could be a local power outage or even a flaky connection in their own home. Down Detector is one of many signal sources and should have a "credibly" score associated with it that's proportional to the number of people complainin…
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