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Update about the October 4th outage

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#41

Post by paxys »

colechristensen wrote: post #34
paxys wrote: post #21

It was quite ironic that while every Facebook property was offline there was an immense amount of misinformation about the incident perpetuated across the internet (including right here on HN) which everyone just believed as fact.

I didn’t see any disinformation, just initial reports that it was DNS which were later explained to be caused by BGP.

- It was government intervention

- Facebook was hacked

- They did it on purpose to bury the whistleblower story

- No one could access Facebook offices

- They had to cut open servers with angle grinders

- Disgruntled employees changed DNS records

- Lots of made up numbers for how much money Facebook/the rest of the economy was losing (or gaining)

They probably rushed out this blog post just to dispel some of these rumors.

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#42

Post by colechristensen »

runawaybottle wrote: post #33
tomrod wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what?

We almost went down the ‘this is a subterfuge to delete whistleblower evidence’ rabbit hole.

I saw a couple of people clearly guessing something along these lines but none of them seemed to be claiming that it was actually happening, more like “isn’t it convenient that…”

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#43

Post by vmception »

geerlingguy wrote: post #14

Gotta love how painfully vague this is. Sounds like a PR piece for investors, not an engineering blog piece.

Its important for many stakeholders to understand it wasn’t a hack/exploit or malicious third party or malicious insider

Its much better for some random committee in Congress to debate antitrust forever, instead of bigger committees and agencies debating national security threats

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#44

Post by colechristensen »

paxys wrote: post #41
colechristensen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t see any disinformation, just initial reports that it was DNS which were later explained to be caused by BGP.

- It was government intervention - Facebook was hacked - They did it on purpose to bury the whistleblower story - No one could access Facebook offices - They had to cut open servers with angle grinders - Disgruntled employees changed DNS records - Lots of made up numbers for how much money Facebook/the rest of the economy was losing (or gaining) They probably rushed out this blog post just to dispel some of these rum…

I entirely believed that the badge readers on doors were broken, I have set systems like that up and they’re network connected. It is not the least bit surprising that BGP chaos would break that. That doesn’t mean people literally couldn’t get in the building, more like security was really annoyed and confused all day.

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#45

Post by megablast »

jensensbutton wrote: post #36
paxys wrote: post #21

It was quite ironic that while every Facebook property was offline there was an immense amount of misinformation about the incident perpetuated across the internet (including right here on HN) which everyone just believed as fact.

Seriously. I also saw lots of posts about how quiet it would be with Facebook down, but I don't think I've ever been exposed to so many stories and so much chatter about Facebook in a single day.

Do you think people on Facebook just talk about facebook??

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#46

Post by colechristensen »

coliveira wrote: post #29

The best course of action is to split FB into separate companies. It is already neatly divided between instagram, WU and legacy facebook. That would be the best for the government to avoid disruptions.

Of all the reasons to break up big companies, protecting consumers from Instagram downtime is not one of them.

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#47

Post by kumarvvr »

paxys wrote: post #41
colechristensen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t see any disinformation, just initial reports that it was DNS which were later explained to be caused by BGP.

- It was government intervention - Facebook was hacked - They did it on purpose to bury the whistleblower story - No one could access Facebook offices - They had to cut open servers with angle grinders - Disgruntled employees changed DNS records - Lots of made up numbers for how much money Facebook/the rest of the economy was losing (or gaining) They probably rushed out this blog post just to dispel some of these rum…

> - It was government intervention

There was an Indian opposition Member of Parliament blaming the current government that it blocked FB due to some protests being held in the Capital.

Re: Update about the October 4th outage

#49

Post by spoonjim »

tshaddox wrote: post #31
spoonjim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if you own 3 independent businesses, each of which would be worth over $100 billion, and you break all of them simultaneously for an entire day, including your internal email and your badge entry systems, yes, that is definitionally an anti-pattern.

Surely “anti-pattern” doesn’t just mean “anything with negative outcomes.” Couldn’t this just be a really big mistake that isn’t indicative of an anti-pattern?

Single point of failure is the oldest anti-pattern in the book. Goes back 5000 years.
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