Facebook was down • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook was down

#251

Post by akkishore » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:04 AM UTC

mjburgess wrote: post #247

jacquesm wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the more external components you tie in to the bigger the chance that one of them will be down. So you try to keep such dependencies to an absolute minimum otherwise you end up with the joint downtime of all those services.

No, that's not how risk works. Centralization of services to a single platform is more risky.

Your risk increases with more moving parts that you introduce into your product. It does not decrease.

Probably you are talking about redundancy where, I agree, it does go down.

Re: Facebook was down

#252

Post by stingraycharles » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:31 AM UTC

laumars wrote: post #192

stingraycharles wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that nobody should care about Facebook being down, and that "a few people" depend on Facebook's SSO. This has a major impact on a lot of sites, and there are millions of people that do care about Facebook. It is worthy of a HN submission, although I personally care most about the postmortem to find out what went wrong.

My complaint was actually about the number of submissions rather than it being submitted or that people shouldn't care.

Ok if that was the case, I understand the sentiment, but the words you chose to make that point were badly chosen.

Re: Facebook was down

#253

Post by rgo » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:31 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #224

mjburgess wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Everyone has to depend on some infrastruture to provide their service. I'd imagine pretty much every hosting platform (from amazon to dreamhost) has less reliability than facebook.

Sure, but the more external components you tie in to the bigger the chance that one of them will be down. So you try to keep such dependencies to an absolute minimum otherwise you end up with the joint downtime of all those services.

External dependencies increase failure points, no argue there.

It depends on your line of business, but if you compare the benefits of making user signup faster, lowering acquisition barriers and getting access to the social graph of users against the risks of depending on one of the top infrastructures in the cloud, I think it may well be worth the trouble.

Re: Facebook was down

#254

Post by gchokov » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:33 AM UTC

piokuc wrote: post #143

gchokov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are excited, since this is one of the core missions and thinking in facebook - never be down, or people will go elsewhere. That's why it's a big deal, not everyday something goes that wrong, especially in something you put a lot efforts in.

Where will the people go? An engineer from Bloomberg was telling me once about their infrastructure, how fault tolerant and highly available it is, they have redundancy everywhere, including power from two different power plants. He said if they were down for few minutes they would be out of business - users of their trading platform would switch to Reuters very quickly. But where will Facebook users go if the site i…

It's more of an idea, that if you are not good, people will eventually find better service. Right now, they really can go elsewhere (if you not count bashing on twitter :)), but imagine that facebook downtimes become a norm - eventually there will be a better service.

Re: Facebook was down

#255

Post by gbog » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:35 AM UTC

mattkrea wrote: post #118

thethimble wrote: post #81

As a new sysadmin, it brings me comfort that even sites like facebook go down sometimes :)

This happens to everyone. Unfortunately, it's not a good enough excuse when, for example, the corporate sites I run go down. No application, desktop or web app, is truly bulletproof.

Ok, but some are more than others. Facebook is not famous for its outages, as far as I know.

Re: Facebook was down

#256

Post by justplay » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:38 AM UTC

works good here in India.

Re: Facebook was down

#257

Post by partomniscient » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:43 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #240

feider wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a bug in your logic. Correct operator is "or".

Programming use of logical operators and regular speech is not compatible. I agree that this is a bug in the English language but this is a forum, not a computer program.

I too would like to deprecate 'or' in favour of 'ior' and 'xor'. Not sure whether A. A. Milne would like it though?

Today's unofficial but fun to pronounce related word is "specificity".

Re: Facebook was down

#258

Post by timc3 » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:49 AM UTC

acesubido wrote: post #67

This is a very interesting event for the world: on a rough estimate, almost half a billion people are displaced right now. Where are all those man-minutes going to, now that facebook is down and they're not facing that iconic blue header bar on their browser? The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interestin…

The worlds population is increasing as suddenly people discover relationships in meat space ;-)

Re: Facebook was down

#259

Post by KayEss » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:50 AM UTC

akkishore wrote: post #251

mjburgess wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not how risk works. Centralization of services to a single platform is more risky.

Your risk increases with more moving parts that you introduce into your product. It does not decrease. Probably you are talking about redundancy where, I agree, it does go down.

You're both right, if you talk about different sorts of risk. There's far more chance that you'll get authentication wrong than Facebook -- and that's a risk. It's probably more likely that your authentication service will go down than Facebook's. But if it's all yours then Facebook has no control over you, so that's one less risk.

As for which risk is the most important risk, well, that's up to your business to decide. But nothing is without risk, all you can do is choose which to expose yourself to.

Re: Facebook was down

#260

Post by tls » Thu, Jun 19, 2014, 10:53 AM UTC

Gonzih wrote: post #210

makaiookami wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even possible. Once you delete something it stays on facebook for like weeks. They would have to have accidentally blown up everything with a bomb to have the problem you're talking about.

wat?

that escalated quickly.