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Facebook was down

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Re: Facebook was down

#201

Post by blazespin »

eridius wrote: post #173
bombtrack wrote: post #92

Obviously anyone can "take credit" for things like this, but if this[1] is true, then jesus. Edit: Since it's topical, I enjoy listening to Chuck Rossi in interviews or presentations. Releng 2014 - Keynote 1: Chuck Rossi, Release Engineering, Facebook Inc. | Talks at Google [2] [1] https://twitter.com/lizardmafia/status/559963134006292481 [2] http://youtu.be/Nffzkkdq7GM?t=4m39s

I gotta say I'm finding it hard to accept their word that they're responsible for Facebook. I haven't paid much attention but I'm under the impression that they primarily just deal in DDoS's and other crude attacks, and I have a hard time imagining that they could cause a large enough DDoS to affect the massive juggernaut that is Facebook. Especially since Facebook just came back up and is now perfectly responsive an…

Simple Bayesian analysis says it is them as they do not have a record of lying. Why would they? There is nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Re: Facebook was down

#203

Post by raverbashing »

eridius wrote: post #173
bombtrack wrote: post #92

Obviously anyone can "take credit" for things like this, but if this[1] is true, then jesus. Edit: Since it's topical, I enjoy listening to Chuck Rossi in interviews or presentations. Releng 2014 - Keynote 1: Chuck Rossi, Release Engineering, Facebook Inc. | Talks at Google [2] [1] https://twitter.com/lizardmafia/status/559963134006292481 [2] http://youtu.be/Nffzkkdq7GM?t=4m39s

I gotta say I'm finding it hard to accept their word that they're responsible for Facebook. I haven't paid much attention but I'm under the impression that they primarily just deal in DDoS's and other crude attacks, and I have a hard time imagining that they could cause a large enough DDoS to affect the massive juggernaut that is Facebook. Especially since Facebook just came back up and is now perfectly responsive an…

Yeah, normal access patterns to FB are already pretty much as big as a DDOS on a regular website

Re: Facebook was down

#206

Post by coffeecheque »

austinl wrote: post #178
bombtrack wrote: post #92

Obviously anyone can "take credit" for things like this, but if this[1] is true, then jesus. Edit: Since it's topical, I enjoy listening to Chuck Rossi in interviews or presentations. Releng 2014 - Keynote 1: Chuck Rossi, Release Engineering, Facebook Inc. | Talks at Google [2] [1] https://twitter.com/lizardmafia/status/559963134006292481 [2] http://youtu.be/Nffzkkdq7GM?t=4m39s

I doubt it was them, though think it's worth watching since Facebook will definitely have a post-mortem. If it's not DDoS/security related, then it would be kind of embarrassing for Lizard Squad (which is why I'm surprised to see them claim it). For example, Facebook's last major downtime was caused by a main database failure – nothing to do with any vulnerabilities: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineerin…

LS have claimed responsibility for other services too though - HipChat, for example. It's unlikely all would suffer from internal issues at once.

Though, as has been said before, anyone can claim responsibility. We'll soon see.

Re: Facebook was down

#207

Post by eridius »

blazespin wrote: post #201
eridius wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta say I'm finding it hard to accept their word that they're responsible for Facebook. I haven't paid much attention but I'm under the impression that they primarily just deal in DDoS's and other crude attacks, and I have a hard time imagining that they could cause a large enough DDoS to affect the massive juggernaut that is Facebook. Especially since Facebook just came back up and is now perfectly responsive an…

Simple Bayesian analysis says it is them as they do not have a record of lying. Why would they? There is nothing to gain and everything to lose.

Nothing to gain? Taking down Facebook seems like something that would bolster their rep significantly. If they think they can claim credit for it and get away with it, then there seems to be little reason why they wouldn't.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Facebook makes any public statements as to what the cause of the outage was.

Re: Facebook was down

#208

Post by nostrademons »

mjdesa wrote: post #193
nostrademons wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gets DDoSed all the time. You don't hear about it because, well, the DDoS SREs are very, very good at what they do.

SREs?

Site Reliability Engineer. It's a Google (+Facebook)-specific title that is sort of like a sysadmin or devops, but instead of keeping the system up, they write code that keeps the system up. They also have a different negotiating position vs. engineering than in many other companies, eg. SREs have veto power over many architectural decisions in the code, and it's more "we'll build the system that can stay upright with a minimum of pagerstorms" vs. "you build the system and throw it over the wall to us and then we'll keep it upright through our self-sacrificing heroism."

Re: Facebook was down

#209

Post by kevan »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #200
eridius wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta say I'm finding it hard to accept their word that they're responsible for Facebook. I haven't paid much attention but I'm under the impression that they primarily just deal in DDoS's and other crude attacks, and I have a hard time imagining that they could cause a large enough DDoS to affect the massive juggernaut that is Facebook. Especially since Facebook just came back up and is now perfectly responsive an…

Yeah, it doesn't seem like a DoS since facebook was reachable and serving error pages, and instagram was reachable and serving blank pages. It _does_ seem like an intrusion or other security incident though because I'd be surprised to learn that instagram shares lots of critical infrastructure with facebook. It seems more likely that someone hit the panic button for both sites.

I wasn't even getting DNS resolution for any of the affected sites.
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