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Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

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Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#321
post #201

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Why does this need a blockchain?

TLDR: Because Smart Contracts on the blockchain are the right tool for Secure Digital Agreements. Paperweight contracts are irrelevant in a world of data * A Smart Contract is cheaper to publish that the stack of paper handled by lawyers. * Code is cheap to iterate from whereas traditional SLA are expensive/slow to renegociate. Over time, SLAs drive behaviors that are focused on delivering a minimum level of service…

so, are you saying we should replace social media platforms w/ decentralized sharing & aggregation driven by smart contracts? sounds intriguing but daunting

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#322
post #116
post #40

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One of the largest internet companies in the world having a massive, global outage? Yes, that seems like appropriate news for "hacker news", a website where people discuss technology news.

wow, tough crowd today. i didn't think people took facebook and instagram so seriously. i'll put the sarcasm machine back in the drawer.

This is HN, we take everything seriously.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#323

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unscheduled outages are always painful and people will always call, I agree. But instant compensation is doing a better job at damage control that a status page. Keeping customer satisfaction even in bad situation is key in a world of high availability expectations. And with a distributed, non partisan metric sourcing about the availability of an API, it's not possible for a Service Provider to lie anymore. Feel free…

I don’t understand something: what kind of company is so down to the wire with cash flow that an outage requires income within seconds/minutes instead of weeks? Anyone with a financial runway so short that it can be described as “instantaneous” doesn’t sound like a customer you would want to be in business with.

> what kind of company

The kind that will make a lot of noise as publicly as possible and create ample work for your support/admin people if you don't keep them happy...

> doesn’t sound like a customer you would want to be in business with

I could say that about most of the companies I have had the dubious pleasure of doing business with! Very few are pleasant when something goes awry even for a moment.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#324

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Typically that could be done with one undrain command and take about 30 seconds.

Holy Batcave, I'm a baby SRE compared to that . Mind. Blown¹. /Acey ¹—I don't use FB [true] but I hear it's huge :-P

it's only so quick because stuff isn't actually turned off with disks wiped. The machines are still running, with applications loaded, just with no traffic directed towards them.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#325
post #101

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I don't believe Gmail was ever fully down. For me, I was just having problems with attachments. I also noticed app icons in the play store failing to load.

Didn't they just announce shutting down Flickr or something. Plus they could be decommissioning Google+ stuff. Maybe this is related. Just a guess.

You may be thinking of Picasa, which had it's EOL announced in 2016, and the web API due to be discontinued 15 March 2019 (tomorrow)

Google+ APIs were shutdown 9 March 2019

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#326
post #132

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I consider my relationship with Messenger separate from FB. Most of my conversations happen there. I've deleted FB from my phone, but I don't think I could ever go without Messenger.

I used to be like that. One day I just sent the same message to all people I still contacted on messenger saying that I was getting rid of it in one week and listing 3 alternate services people could use to contact me. Didn't lose a single contact and never looked back.

Group chats won't follow you though.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#327

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I don't think it's the NSA this time, for once they don't have to do deep package analysis or install any MITM device since they get the whole info in bulk, maybe it's just a 400-pound hacker.

I've never understood the 400 pound hacker thing. Does it refer to body weight or technical prowess?

I spontaneously took it as a loose analogy to dominant male gorillas and the extent to which they need to be taken seriously.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#328
post #16

Can you imagine if Twitter and Google went down at the same time? People would be reactivating their Facebook accounts and having to sift through conspiracy theory posts about Hillary Clinton still just to figure out what was going on. Edit: The points on this post keep going up and down every time I check these comments. Yes, it was sarcasm, I was joking, but I was trying to point out that most people rely on a smal…

Whenever I hear when some service is down, I immediately go to that service to confirm. Then I repeatedly hit reload if it doesn't work to see if it can come up. I guess many people do the same and that may contribute to the problem...

Years ago I worked at a large online casual gaming company who's name ended in -ynga. Our web tier was split into two: one for serving static content required to load the HTML, Flash app, assets, etc. The other was for actual communication regarding actions taken in game.

Whenever we had any sort of issue we could generally get a good idea of what was happening by looking at changes in traffic in those two web tiers.

If people couldn't play for most reasons, game action traffic would drop to near zero, but the static asset tier traffic would usually at least triple.

So yeah, there are a lot of F5 buttons being hit out there when pages don't load.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#329
post #241
post #237

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Indeed. The games are streamed like crazy! Lots of streams are in HD.

Yep, the actual bandwidth consumption is mindblowing :)

Multicast was designed exactly for this - same data streamed to many endpoints at the same time. Too bad it's not being more widely used, the bandwidth savings would likely be huge.

Re: Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage

#330

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Short duration: network, bad software deploy Long duration: db. If you break data, it takes a while to unbreak. Source: Me. My career has been spent managing db's for internet scale sites.

I work for a smaller but comparably large platform. "If everything is down check the DB" is at the top of one of our internal monitoring websites in red. Screw ups related to data loss are rare (I've been here years and haven't seen one with the DBs that the stuff I work with uses) but failures at this scale tend to cascade a little ways and it takes time to dig out of the hole. They probably have the problem solved…

Shouldn't the monitoring websites be able to check the DB status for you before you even look at that red text? :)
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