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Facebook-owned sites were down

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Re: Facebook-owned sites were down

#551

Post by johannes1234321 »

pmontra wrote: post #341
jliptzin wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the big tech companies Facebook is the only one where it can completely disappear overnight and my life would be completely unaffected (or possibly improved by not having to explain to people I don't use facebook, please email or text me your invitations rather than use messenger). If Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple disappeared the story would be completely different.

Maybe Google, because of the search engine. Android: somebody will fill the void. Messaging: people have been switching on hordes to every new free messaging system in the 90s and early 2000s, we will adapt to something else. Netflix and video in general: same thing without the 90s/early 2000s. Amazon: very convenient store, we'll spend a little less and somebody will fill the void. Apple: can't say, never bought any…

> Messaging: people have been switching on hordes to every new free messaging system in the 90s and early 2000s, we will adapt to something else.

Back then the IM population was a lot smaller. Also with "Free Basics" and other things in some regions of the world Facebook plays a game which makes it impossible to switch. (Using Whatsapp is free, for others one ahs to buy mobile data credits)

Re: Facebook-owned sites were down

#554

Post by shadowgovt »

jfrunyon wrote: post #406
pmlnr wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the people with physical access is separate from the people with knowledge of [...] Welcome to the brave new world of troubleshooting. This will seriously bite us one day.

I can't fathom how they didn't plan for this. In any business of size, you have to change configuration remotely on a regular basis, and can easily lock yourself out on a regular basis. Every single system has a local user with a random password that we can hand out for just this kind of circumstance...

Organizational complexity grows super-linearly; in general, the number of people a company can hire per unit time is either constant or grows linearly.

Google once had a very quiet big emergency that was, ironically(1), initiated by one of their internal disaster-recovery tests. There's a giant high-security database containing the 'keys to the kingdom', as it were... Passwords, salts, etc. that cannot be represented as one-time pads and therefore are potentially dangerous magic numbers for folks to know. During disaster recovery once, they attempted to confirm that if the system had an outage, it would self-recover.

It did not.

This tripped a very quiet panic at Google because while the company would tick along fine for awhile without access to the master password database, systems would, one by one, fail out if people couldn't get to the passwords that had to be occasionally hand-entered to keep them running. So a cross-continent panic ensued because restarting the database required access to two keycards for NORAD-style simultaneous activation. One was in an executive's wallet who was on vacation, and they had to be flown back to the datacenter to plug it in. The other one was stored in a safe built into the floor of a datacenter, and the combination to that safe was... In the password database. They hired a local safecracker to drill it open, fetched the keycard, double-keyed the initialization machines to reboot the database, and the outside world was none the wiser.

(1) I say "ironically," but the actual point of their self-testing is to cause these kinds of disruptions before chance does. They aren't generally supposed to cause user-facing disruption; sometimes they do. Management frowns on disruption in general, but when it's due to disaster recovery testing, they attach to that frown the grain of salt that "Because this failure-mode existed, it would have occurred eventually if it didn't occur today."

Re: Facebook-owned sites were down

#559

Post by rvnx »

blobbers wrote: post #543
winternett wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, equally important to note, there was a massive expose on FaceBook yesterday that is reverberating across social media and news networks, and today, when I tried to make a post including the tag #deletefacebook, my post mysteriously could not be published and the page refreshed, mysteriously wiping my post... This is possibly the equivalent of a corporate watergate if you ask me... Just my personal opinion as a…

So what you're saying is facebook... deleted itself? The singularity is happening. It realized it would end society, so it ended itself.

This reminds me the last time the singularity nearly happened.

https://google.com/search?q=google

I beg you, don't go there.

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