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Facebook was down

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Re: Facebook was down

#251

Hmm, interestingly enough Faceboook today "has complied with a Turkish court order demanding the blocking of a page it said offended the Prophet Muhammad." [0] [0] http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30982556

[deleted]

Re: Facebook was down

#252

I've always thought how strange it is when people notice and make such a big deal about facebook being down or accessible. It's almost as if fb has become a public utility or something. As others have remarked, one way one can interpret this is it is a testament to their ops' exceptional ability as engineers that such downtime is so noticeable.

>It's almost as if fb has become a public utility or something. Well thats what Zuckerberg answered a user to the question "Why Facebook wasn't cool anymore". He didn't want it to be cool , but more like a digital utility like water or electricity

The trouble with that analogy is that water and electricity (just about) are absolutely essential to our day-to-day lives; a specific social media site isn't. Facebook needs to appeal to the trend to keep in business. Hugely popular social networking sites have failed in the past, precisely when they've fallen out if fashion.

Re: Facebook was down

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some sort of security incidence does seem more plausible than a DDoS, although I can't think of what would affect Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Hipchat, and AIM simultaneously. I'm also having a hard time imagining what sort of security incident would result in Facebook deliberately shutting down their web presence, even for a few minutes. And all of the other potential attacks, such as DNS or CDN, seems like it a) wo…

Instagram runs within the Facebook data centers. They had some challenging scaling issues within Amazon Web Services and moved their code base to Facebook's infrastructure.

Re: Facebook was down

#257
"This was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems. We moved quickly to fix the problem, and both services are back to 100% for everyone." - Facebook spokesperson [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/blakeyblogs/status/559995252485140480

Re: Facebook was down

#259
post #57
post #24

Akamai, the CDN used by Facebook went down before Facebook for me this morning: http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/akamaihd.net

Looking through the customer list, most other sites seem to be working fine: http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/customer_list.html I wonder what makes FB and Instagram different?

Akamai has several different networks, one for streaming media, one for regular http, and one for https. They also have an S3-like storage system and a DNS service. Some customers are configured with several of these offerings at once, so it's hard to know which, if any, experienced problems and led to the outages.

Honestly, I doubt it was an Akamai issue. If Akamai experienced network problems, dozens or hundreds of sites would be affected. If an Akamai config issue (ie human error) were to blame, then it would probably only affect one site, not several. Neither FB nor Akamai is dumb enough to push multiple site changes at once.

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