Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp Outage

downdetector.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#41

Post by abdullahkhalids »

mikece wrote: post #28
mikece wrote: post #4

Proof that services written in Erlang CAN go down! (Though it's probably DNS...)

Serious question: is making a joke frowned upon on HN?

I like to think of HN conversations as taking place in a third or fourth year university elective course. You are here because you want to learn something. Hence, all comments should be substantive and contribute to the learning of the class. In this scenario, jokes should be occasional, and should be embedded in a larger constructive comment, much as they would be in actual university class.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#42

Post by callalex »

netsharc wrote: post #14

Curious that since it's the .in domain, the map just shows India. But if you replace it with .com, or .de, it will show the map of those countries (with .de it redirects to a German version of the domain). Someone said the other week that downdetector just monitors how many people check their site for outages, and if in a five minute time period 20000 people are looking at them to see if WhatsApp is down... then, tha…

As I always say, downdetector has successfully predicted 20 of the last 3 outages. It really is the perfect website for the ad-supported revenue model.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#43

Post by Retr0id »

mikece wrote: post #28
mikece wrote: post #4

Proof that services written in Erlang CAN go down! (Though it's probably DNS...)

Serious question: is making a joke frowned upon on HN?

Yes, which only makes it more fun to make jokes that get upvoted despite the frowning.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#47

Post by clessg »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #41
mikece wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: is making a joke frowned upon on HN?

I like to think of HN conversations as taking place in a third or fourth year university elective course. You are here because you want to learn something. Hence, all comments should be substantive and contribute to the learning of the class. In this scenario, jokes should be occasional, and should be embedded in a larger constructive comment, much as they would be in actual university class.

I was about to say something nearly identical to this, but couldn't have put it better than you did! In this specific scenario, I think the joke was in good taste and might even spawn some serious discussion and questioning (as seems to be the case already).

In fact, I came to this thread wondering if such a comment (about Erlang) would be made, and I was not disappointed. I am an Elixir (/Erlang/Gleam/BEAM/OTP) fanboy and WhatsApp is basically the canonical example of OTP's strengths, so perhaps I should be outraged! But I am not, and that says a lot about the quality of the joke (it's not a "Reddit-style" joke - it actually makes one think). It's fun and enlightening to consider the ways in which Erlang's reliability guarantees can be hamstrung by (presumably) external factors such as DNS/hardware/BGP, and a good reminder that things are messier than just which language or platform one chooses.

Anyway, yes. I would distinguish between enlightening jokes that arouse curiosity, and Reddit-style low-quality "humor" and trolling.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#48

Post by Hamuko »

duhast2020 wrote: post #46

This will die out when Apple enabled RCS.

lolno

Why the hell are you going to abandon the app that you have and where all of your friends are? What incentive do you have? RCS isn't even feature-complete compared to WhatsApp and has for example no encryption.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#49

Post by lvass »

HenryBemis wrote: post #39
politelemon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that behaviour could be engineered to fake an outage, though I'm unsure as to what end.

It wouldn't be much of a sabotage since the users would actually be able to access the 'service impacted'. Perhaps it could affect a stock price, but someone who sells a stock (i.e. Meta in this case) because WhatsApp had a 1-5-10-30mins downtime, is doing themselves a disservice and us a favor :)

>and us a favor :)

So there is a plan.

Re: WhatsApp Outage

#50

Post by Funes- »

ActorNightly wrote: post #2

Instagram down as well.

Whenever these massive services get any substantial downtime I fantasize about it extending over a large amount of time. Just imagine getting rid of Instagram and TikTok for a while, considering the insurmountable addiction most people have to them. I bet the massive change in behaviour would be palpable very quickly, especially in kids who've known nothing else.
Post reply on HN