This seems to be impacting a number of huge sites, including the UK government website[0]. [0] https://www.gov.uk/ https://m.media-amazon.com/ https://pages.github.com/ https://www.paypal.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ https://nytimes.com/ Edit: Fastly's incident report status page: https://status.fastly.com/incidents/vpk0ssybt3bj
Fastly Outage
541–550 of 740 posts
Re: Fastly Outage
#542Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point isn't to dance around the incident, but to not blame people. You can blame systems, design, engineering culture, processes, but don't blame people. Even if someone accidentally pressed the 'destroy prod' button, that's not the fault of that person, it's the fault of that button existing and being accessible in the first place. I have no empathy for Fastly-the-company. I hate the fact that the Internet is ce…
I disagree. People implemented those systems, so if you are correct that it is the systems fault, then it is also a persons fault. People must be held accountable to have good incentives to reduce such outtages in the future. I do agree though that we should always be compassionate and realistic with other humans.
Holding specific people "accountable" for outages doesn't incentivize reducing outages; it incentivizes not getting caught for having caused the outage.
As a result, post-mortems turn into finger-pointing games instead of finding and resolving the root cause of the issue, which costs the company more money in the long run when a political scapegoat is found but the actual bug in the code is not.
Re: Fastly Outage
#543Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [0] https://www.gov.uk/ Just checked, thank god the NHS vaccine site is still available - vaccines just got rolled out for under 30s today.
Edit: I didn’t mean anything negative here! Just slightly shocked that as the UK is opening up under 30 vaccinations, the US is struggling to find any more willing takers. It’s really probably a sign that there’s fewer anti-vaxxers in the UK more than anything. And that universal healthcare is more efficient at distribution than an inherently for profit system. I don’t know, but I just didn’t realize it was so differ…
I must admit, it has been strange seeing my US peers getting the vaccine months before I can in the UK, but I guess I take comfort knowing that both countries are still doing pretty well!
Re: Fastly Outage
#544This seems to be impacting a number of huge sites, including the UK government website[0]. [0] https://www.gov.uk/ https://m.media-amazon.com/ https://pages.github.com/ https://www.paypal.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ https://nytimes.com/ Edit: Fastly's incident report status page: https://status.fastly.com/incidents/vpk0ssybt3bj
But https://news.ycombinator.com/ is UP! :) Prepare those HN servers for massive influx in 3...2..1..
Re: Fastly Outage
#545This seems to be impacting a number of huge sites, including the UK government website[0]. [0] https://www.gov.uk/ https://m.media-amazon.com/ https://pages.github.com/ https://www.paypal.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ https://nytimes.com/ Edit: Fastly's incident report status page: https://status.fastly.com/incidents/vpk0ssybt3bj
Fastly Engineer 1: Seems like a common error message. Can you check stackoverflow to see if there's an easy fix? Fastly Engineer 2: I have some very bad news...
Re: Fastly Outage
#546Re: Fastly Outage
#547Yep, seems like: Reddit BBC News Twitch.tv Twitter emoji cdn? are all down 503 service error
Ah didn't cop that Twitter emoji issue was related! Thought an ad-blocker was stepping up its filters aggressively :) Stack Overflow, The Guardian, Gov.uk too as some other biggish names getting hit.
Re: Fastly Outage
#548Stupid question: why didn't sites "just" fail over to their actual servers to handle the traffic, albeit slowly? I guess they won't be sized to handle the load in a lot of cases, and Fastly was responding, so DNS fail over didn't work?
Re: Fastly Outage
#549Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. Losing sleep sounds like an over-reaction. No system is foolproof. Of course Fastly should do what they can to prevent downtime, but it's still expected that they will go down. I would blame anyone who claimed otherwise or couldn't deal with it while not having a fallback.
I hear that you're suggesting that those involved shouldnt feel bad because its a systemic / just a job / etc. But the reality is that incidents like this can be very traumatic for those involved and thats not something they can control. If it was that simple to manage, depression and anxiety would not be a thing. Think its best to show a large amount of support and empathy for the individuals having a really bad day…
But I think our disagreement mainly stems from how we interpreted the parent comment. I thought it was very double, at one hand claiming to show support, at the other hand emphasizing how big of a catastrophy this was.
I just wanted to say that I think it most likely was a completely natural mistake, only exerbarated by the scale of the company, and that while you should take some action to prevent it in the future, you should not spend so much time dwelling on it. Shit happens, it's fine.
Re: Fastly Outage
#550Yeah so it's been mentioned in the comments already, but to everyone in Fastly right now: I feel for you. Something like this must be insanely stressful, and not just during the outage. There will be (should be) a massive post-mortem. People will be losing sleep over this for days, weeks, months. :( Edit: There seems to be a major empathy outage in this thread. Disgusted but not surprised, unfortunately.
They shouldn't lose sleep over it, though.