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

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

usatoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 351 posts

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

#71

Post by cronix »

popz41 wrote: post #58
godzillabrennus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private post Morten: The NSA middleware we are required to run (that took time to deploy to each of our social partners) is breaking something so let’s revert. Public post Mortem: Entirely believable technical cause.

I imagine the NSA uses an optical tap device. These devices create identical copies and require no power or management.

That's why it's called PRISM. It's exactly what you describe. Splitting an optical signal into 2 using, basically, a prism. One signal goes out to the net as normal, the other goes to their own datacenters, that they keep continually building and expanding. The newer ones are being build on military bases, for added security. Check em out. Look at the size and cost of them. Some are over a million sq. ft. That's a lot of data. They measure it in terms of zottabytes and zettabytes (in 2013, a lifetime ago in terms of storage space):

https://modernsurvivalblog.com/government-gone-wild/nsa-loca...

http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/

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

#72

Post by Implicated »

Facebook's own status dashboard (https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/) showed no issues or outtage just 30 min ago.

I run a messenger bot platform - the webhooks stopped being delivered _hours_ ago... nothing on their status page until it had been down for hours.

Their current issue...

"We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution."

What? lmao

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

#73

Post by kartan »

"This usually means we're making an improvement to the database your account is stored on. While this process won't affect your account, you temporarily won't be able to access the site." https://www.facebook.com/help/134401680031995

I guess that this is all that I will get. Facebook is never down, it is just making improvements (like restarting the services to make them work again).

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

#74

Post by nimir »

nabla9 wrote: post #59

Serious question: Was any value lost? (this may appear sarcastic) Facebook obviously loses some ad revenue and Facebook customers may lose sales. But do Facebook/Instagram users suffer? But how does losing social media for several hours affect the quality of life of users?

I am not a big fan of social media too but you will be suprised ... For example here in Sudan (East Africa) the country has been under continuous protests for over 2 months now (53 dead, 4k+ detained, 500+ injured) with strong censorship from the regime & silents from the internatinal community. So facebook, whatsapp & twitter are the only media left for the people to fight for freedom —> every Thursday is the main protests in the week and this Wedensday night the outage might affect this as thousands around Sudan won't know about the meeting points of tomorrow!!!

Actually the government did block all social media for over a month but that was fixable with vpn. (Follow hashtag #SudanUprising on twitter to learn more)

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

#75

Post by crb002 »

jedberg wrote: post #9

So yesterday Google had a major (and out of character) outage across its apps, and today Facebook has a major (and also out of character) outage across its apps. I can't wait to see the RCA for both of these and if they're related.

Curious of they did it due to a kernel exploit being used by a nation state bad enough that it was worth YOLO patching.

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

#76

Post by komali2 »

linsomniac wrote: post #53

Could this be related to the storm? I was out shoveling, and came back in to my phone blowing up. Our systems at IronMountain (formerly Fortrust) in Denver all rebooted at once. These are all on redundant power, each systems redundant power supplies connecting to different circuits entering the cabinet, and those two circuits fed from 3 PDUs (two separate, one share). Each of those is supposed to be fed by a separate…

Do they do this to get around and 99.9% uptime agreements?

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

#77

Post by Implicated »

komali2 wrote: post #76
linsomniac wrote: post #53

Could this be related to the storm? I was out shoveling, and came back in to my phone blowing up. Our systems at IronMountain (formerly Fortrust) in Denver all rebooted at once. These are all on redundant power, each systems redundant power supplies connecting to different circuits entering the cabinet, and those two circuits fed from 3 PDUs (two separate, one share). Each of those is supposed to be fed by a separate…

Do they do this to get around and 99.9% uptime agreements?

Probably a combination of that and to curtail the "I just spoke to Brad in Customer Service who confirmed _the whole datacenter if offline_" type posts.

But that's my presumption, I don't actually know anything and don't want to imply I do.

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

#79

Post by nogbit »

twic wrote: post #47
yorwba wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increased Error Rates Created by Gary Fitzpatrick · · Facebook Team — Today at 10:32 AM Current State: Investigating Description: We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a resolution. Start Time: 2 hours ago Last Update: about an hour ago Updates: There are currently no updates for this issue.

> Increased Error Rates Created by Gary Fitzpatrick Well someone tell him to stop, for pete's sake!

I read it that way as well :)

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

#80

Post by jsgo »

bargl wrote: post #34
wybiral wrote: 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…

I think the only reason your comment gets down voted is because it's biased only to one side. I see about what Jon Oliver states as if I remember correct 1/2 as many conspiracy posts from about Trump (Edit: I meant to write conservatives write 2x as many conspiracy posts as democrats. This was not represented in my previous sentence.). It's annoying. I guess to accurately represent things on Facebook you'd have to sa…

it really goes to show how different all of our feeds are based on who we are friends with (and of those, who we interact with the most). Anecdotally, I have 3 people who will share any "conservative" attack meme (at this point, I don't even know if it counts as conservative so much as just outright attacking Democrats. Sometimes it reads more like an attack for the sake of attacking than a statement of belief in something different. Kind of weird. Part of me wonders if maybe some of these accounts do conservative attacks and some do liberal attacks in an attempt to get shares and what not with no political interest whatsoever: effectively acting as an arms dealer of the meme variety.) they can get their hands on and of my friends of a more liberal view, it is mostly policy things they share (pro-choice, anti-rape, etc.). There's one dude that is pretty anti-Trump, but his for the most part stand out as an exception. Most of the ones I see referencing Trump directly (if it isn't during a period where he did something that Democrats felt was highly suspect) are more in support of him than anything.

Which is why I have to refrain from taking an "over the top much?" slant when people post the pro-Trump/victim of the left type memes as I don't see a ton of attacks on him directly, but then again, their feed could be totally different from mine so who knows?

Post reply on HN