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Facebook was down

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Re: Facebook was down

#264
That's why I can't comprehend companies using SaaS solutions like Slack or HipChat for something as crucial as internal communication, that requires a connection to an external server to work. What's even more scary is the data leakage risk - with DDoS you know when something bad happens, because the service simply doesn't work, but with data leakage how can you tell? Every single conversation stored on a 3rd party server. It's ridiculous. Yes, they're well protected, but it's also much more inviting for hackers - once you breach it, you gain a massive amount of sensitive data about thousands of companies... Well, it seems nice UI and 3rd app integrations are more important than security and reliability these days I guess.

Re: Facebook was down

#265
Looks more like a "SW update gown wrong" scenario. People reported problems a few days before already, empty timelines and such. They roll out incremently. Those kind of problems quickly affect the backends.

Re: Facebook was down

#266

Funny how an outage of something as pointless as facebook generates this humongous comment count. But then, some source material for http://www.lamebook.com may have been lost...

Speculating on outages at web juggernauts is squarely within the HN remit of business and web tech.

Re: Facebook was down

#267

That's why I can't comprehend companies using SaaS solutions like Slack or HipChat for something as crucial as internal communication, that requires a connection to an external server to work. What's even more scary is the data leakage risk - with DDoS you know when something bad happens, because the service simply doesn't work, but with data leakage how can you tell? Every single conversation stored on a 3rd party s…

If you are, say, a startup with sensitive information being discussed in an IRC server that you run, do you really think your data would be more secure then? Keep in mind that you can't afford a security expert (or your own time) to admin your system if you're a small business.

As for reliability, I've been using Slack for months without a single outage. If it went down for a day, the impact would be minimal -- I'd just use email and communicate less for that one day. Or I'd switch to another provider. Big deal.

Re: Facebook was down

#268

That's why I can't comprehend companies using SaaS solutions like Slack or HipChat for something as crucial as internal communication, that requires a connection to an external server to work. What's even more scary is the data leakage risk - with DDoS you know when something bad happens, because the service simply doesn't work, but with data leakage how can you tell? Every single conversation stored on a 3rd party s…

What about solutions like Dropbox or Gmail? Or even plain old email for that matter. Even if you look after those yourself, how can you be 100% sure that you can offer a service that is more secure and reliable than a third party?

Re: Facebook was down

#269

That's why I can't comprehend companies using SaaS solutions like Slack or HipChat for something as crucial as internal communication, that requires a connection to an external server to work. What's even more scary is the data leakage risk - with DDoS you know when something bad happens, because the service simply doesn't work, but with data leakage how can you tell? Every single conversation stored on a 3rd party s…

If you are, say, a startup with sensitive information being discussed in an IRC server that you run, do you really think your data would be more secure then? Keep in mind that you can't afford a security expert (or your own time) to admin your system if you're a small business. As for reliability, I've been using Slack for months without a single outage. If it went down for a day, the impact would be minimal -- I'd j…

How about P2P connections, so nothing leave your company's internal network, because why should it? It's the most secure and reliable solution, but even running an IRC server on a local machine is so easy that you don't need an admin.

Re: Facebook was down

#270
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

For further reading, this is a good post: http://www.site-reliability-engineering.info/
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