[HN Gopher] Facebook is back up
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook is back up
Author : adtac
Score : 196 points
Date : 2021-10-04 21:48 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (facebook.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (facebook.com)
| cybernautique wrote:
| Very disappointing.
|
| Hopefully some enterprising ransomware gang can do the world a
| service and encrypt all of FB's data for them, possibly upgrade
| all of their servers and backups to being /dev/null hosts
| entirely.
|
| A man can dream.
| antocv wrote:
| The way to destroy Facebook and the likes of it, is not by
| encrypting all of its data or even parts of it or sending it to
| /dev/null.
|
| The best attack would be in fact to display war footage from
| Syria, the Collateral Damage video and such gore to random
| people at random times, instead of ads perhaps. And to the
| other side who wouldnt mind the violence and gore, show them
| pornhub clips.
| saltyfamiliar wrote:
| That wouldn't destroy it, that'd just turn it into 4chan!
| neoromantique wrote:
| So, terrorize people?
| cybernautique wrote:
| This is a bit extreme, but I'm of the opinion that it's
| literally impossible to act immorally against Facebook. It
| would be unfortunate if this were to happen. Ultimately,
| whatever is good for the goose is good for the gander, and
| there's no worthier goose than the razing of Facebook et
| al.
| silisili wrote:
| Sobering thought:
|
| A politician decides to run on the platform of getting rid of
| social media and/or breaking up big tech.
|
| Big tech has not only the money to run attack ads 24/7, they
| also have access to all your embarrassing photos, location
| history, drunk texts, searches, etc, so more than enough ammo
| to make even a saint look like a sleazeball.
| josalhor wrote:
| The people working on Facebook infra are true Software
| Architects.
|
| I can't certainly imagine the pressure of those involved in
| causing and fixing this issue.
| nikolay wrote:
| Not it's not! There are errors popping up all the time!
| Devasta wrote:
| What a shame.
| mbStavola wrote:
| Damn, nothing good ever lasts huh?
|
| Even if it was only a few hours things have significantly
| improved in my life in the period it went down. Zero anti-vax
| spam from FB sent to me via texts from older relatives.
| davide_v wrote:
| "only a few hours" for Facebook is literally billions.
| tlrobinson wrote:
| Only $13.3 million per hour in revenue [1], but about $45
| billion in market cap today [2].
|
| 1. https://fortune.com/2021/10/04/facebook-outage-cost-
| revenue-...
|
| 2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/FB:NASDAQ
| rytill wrote:
| You mean $945B?
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| At close, market cap was approximately 920B and the stock
| was down about 5%. The change in market cap is therefore
| about 920B * (1 / 0.95 - 1) ~ 48B
| toper-centage wrote:
| But 6 hours for Facebook is proportionally the same as 6
| hours to anyone. If 6 hours is a billion to them, they still
| made 3 billion
| xienze wrote:
| > Zero anti-vax spam from FB sent to me via texts from older
| relatives.
|
| They probably likewise felt similar relief that they didn't
| receive "Republicans bad" spam from their relatives during this
| time period.
| threevox wrote:
| At risk of continuing the devolution of this thread, anti-vax
| != "Republicans bad". Disingenuous false equivalence. One is
| the pinnacle of dangerous, malicious misinformation and the
| other is just a political opinion held by some that is at
| worst reductionistic
| boplicity wrote:
| During the time Facebook (and related properties) have been
| unavailable, I can't help but feel a little better about the
| world. There is so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angry,
| and harmful messaging on FB platforms. It's nice to know all of
| that crap is just....gone. At least for a little while.
| fleddr wrote:
| It's interesting how Facebook experiences differ. To me it's a
| peaceful place showing mundane updates from friends and family,
| with zero politics. Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I
| subscribed, full of very kind and constructive people.
|
| The actual war zone to me is Twitter, not Facebook.
|
| I should add that I'm not from the US.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| >I should add that I'm not from the US.
|
| That's probably a big part of it.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The thing is: if you ever engaged with political posts,
| facebook will make sure to show you political posts for the
| rest of your life, and the more likely to upset you, the
| better.
| rconti wrote:
| 100% agreed. And there is nothing funnier than seeing people
| on "team Twitter" excitedly tweeting about how "nothing of
| value was lost" without any sense of irony whatsoever.
|
| To me, it's the difference between default private and
| default public. On both platforms you can curate your
| content, and arguably the worst content festers on Facebook
| _because_ it is so hidden from the public eye, but it also
| means it doesn 't have to find its way to you.
|
| Facebook as a company has had much more problematic behavior,
| I'd agree with that one for sure.
|
| But if there's anything we've learned from the past decade,
| it's the old axiom "sunlight is the best disinfectant" is
| completely and utterly wrong.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>"sunlight is the best disinfectant" is completely and
| utterly wrong.
|
| Certainly for some types of infectant such as weapons-grade
| dezinformatsiya...
|
| Or at least, to achieve disinfection, that sunlight needs
| to be applied at intensities found on the surface of the
| sun vs at the surface of the earth.
| Permit wrote:
| I suspect the original poster was not complaining about these
| topics showing up on their timeline; they don't want them
| showing up on anyone's timeline.
| bryan_w wrote:
| It can't show up on their timeline, mainly because they
| "Never had a Facebook" or "deleted their Facebook a
| day/month/year ago and it instantly made them
| better/happier/sexier"
| ppod wrote:
| >Plus, a bunch of niche hobby groups I subscribed, full of
| very kind and constructive people.
|
| This is the most underrated aspect. With the caveat that you
| can't choose your family and schoolfriends, you get the
| facebook you deserve. And you know, maybe you should try a
| bit harder to understand your family and schoolfriends?
| 300bps wrote:
| I'm from the U.S. and your experience matches mine. I just
| have like 1 niece, 1 cousin and a friend or two that I had to
| unfollow. I'm still friends with them, I just don't see any
| of the political stuff they post.
|
| I know some people have like 500+ friends or even the max of
| 5,000. I keep my friend list to the 250 people I know in real
| life that I want to keep in touch with. Probably still
| melting my brain but I'm convinced it's nice to keep up with
| people's lives.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Exactly. 150 or so for me, but the ones who insist on being
| political all the time have long since been muted or
| unfriended.
|
| And who do you know who still sends Christmas cards? That
| was for those people that you never see IRL. Now they're FB
| friends.
| ksaj wrote:
| I feel that way about Twitter. Lots of people in my feed
| complain about the baggage that dominates their feeds. Mine
| has none.
|
| There is only one person who was bringing baggage (all men
| are terrible people, here is a never-ending stream of
| examples of what they do to make me so bitter) so I just
| muted them. Other than that person, the people who I've
| chosen to interact with don't bring these negative
| experiences, and hopefully appreciate that I likewise don't
| bring it to them.
|
| Someone else in this thread posted a similar observation to
| some of the people in my Twitter feed. I personally think
| most people already know you can refuse to follow and can
| mute those who make for such negative experiences. If you
| participate in it, of course it's going to feel that way.
| coldcode wrote:
| Most of my followers and followerees on twitter are
| artists, so it's pleasant. I ignore all the other crap.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep. I wouldn't say that there's no politics on my FB feed.
| But it's all either liberal or socialist -- because that's
| the consensus among my friends. And none of it is
| particularly nasty even when it falls out of that.
|
| Also, not from the US. From Canada.
|
| Where I see the nastiness is when politics leaks into various
| hobby topic groups I'm on. And it's almost always Americans
| raising a stink (mad about masks, vaccines, "libtards"
| whatever)
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I'm from the US and have the same experience. Just glancing
| at my feed it's:
|
| Somebody celebrating getting out of rehab.
|
| Somebody heading to Italy for vacation.
|
| Somebody going in a hot air balloon.
|
| Somebody going to Santa Fe for vacation and asking for things
| to do.
|
| Somebody said last night was one of the best nights of their
| life.
|
| Somebody sharing progress updates on their offgrid homestead.
|
| Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
|
| Somebody going on a train ride.
|
| Somebody telling me that Dune movie tickets go on sale today
| (cool).
|
| A bunch of posts from a tesla owners group, laser cutter
| operators group, and sailing groups that I am a part of.
|
| A bunch of posts from buy nothing, and housing groups that
| I'm a part of.
|
| I see literally _nothing_ related to politics.
|
| However, jumping over to _twitter_ it 's:
|
| Something about "the establishment"
|
| A news story about somebody getting shot.
|
| Something about counterterrorism strategies.
|
| North Korean FUD
|
| Something about a gunfight and a DEA agent being killed.
|
| etc. etc.
|
| Facebook seems to me to be a place where people come together
| and talk to each other about happy things happening in their
| lives (or sometimes, looking for support when sad things
| happen).
|
| Twitter seems like a place people go to get angry and scream
| at each other.
| indianpianist wrote:
| > Somebody got a new pizza oven for National pizza month
|
| There's a national pizza month?
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Apparently: https://nationaltoday.com/national-pizza-
| month/
|
| But honestly: who cares. Any excuse to eat some pizza is
| good enough for me!
| dvtrn wrote:
| I picked an awful month to start dieting...again
| prawn wrote:
| I wonder how much this is country-specific. I always see
| Americans decry the content on Twitter. I'm in Australia
| and follow mostly Australians. I'm sure there is outrage
| somewhere, but I don't see much in my feed.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It sounds like you have a curated Facebook feed, and alot
| of shit on your Twitter feed.
|
| The difference is that Facebook will more aggressively push
| crap at you. Twitter feeds tend to rot over time.
| sneak wrote:
| In your list you left out a bunch of ads that were chosen
| based on targeted surveillance of the private lives of you
| and your friends.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Sure, although it doesn't seem to be doing very well at
| the targetting. All of the ads seem to revolve around a
| singular life event that I recently posted about.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter
| and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of
| course is that we have all piled up on a scape goat and the
| rest of the social media companies will continue to enjoy great
| PR. Tiktok continues to be HN's darling.
|
| Edit: Downvotes really? What for?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare
| nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many
| varieties)
|
| It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same
| trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is
| flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social
| media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that
| giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to
| angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has
| never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose
| civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are
| apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So
| we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we
| were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has
| done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not
| acknowledge the shortcomings.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the
| immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost
| immediately afterwards?
|
| The printing press had the exact same issues as today's
| media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A
| balance must be found.
|
| A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that
| newspapers were free to say anything, but if something
| was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers
| (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain
| truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it
| was better than what we have today for sure.
|
| The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new
| system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on
| Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google
| Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you
| sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the
| first 150+ years of American history with the 1st
| Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander
| laws.
|
| People don't really care about the national-level
| discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really
| affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how
| misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or
| helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly
| jaded about this "Free information" online.
|
| --------
|
| I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st
| step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history,
| we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with
| those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with
| free communication, but we must work our best to clamp
| down on the "evil stuff".
|
| I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free
| speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation",
| etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities
| of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the
| left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like
| we're that far apart on the matter).
|
| ------
|
| In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs
| Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its
| not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had
| different political powers swing free-speech one way, and
| then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of
| Censorship during WW2).
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Unfortunately Twitter was still alive and QAnon conspiracy
| accounts were making fun of Facebook. Maybe next time.
| boplicity wrote:
| One step at a time. ;)
| Covzire wrote:
| Someone was wrong on the internets? BRING IN THE FEDS!
| antocv wrote:
| All the hate and comments but you forgot what keeps it on. The
| ads. All the ads.
| Wistar wrote:
| My God, it's full of ads.
| aierou wrote:
| It didn't really affect me, as I get most of my hate,
| arguments, misinformation, angry, and harmful messaging from HN
| and Reddit.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It does feel nice, like the oppressor has died, at least for a
| bit. Also fun to watch the scramble to get it back online,
| would be nice if it never came back :)
| cmpxchg8b wrote:
| How did it oppress you? Can you point to the place on the
| doll where it hurt you?
| thatsamonad wrote:
| > _Can you point to the place on the doll where it hurt
| you?_
|
| Using a reference to how survivors of abuse are often
| required to re-enact their abuse to make a snarky comment
| is neither funny nor clever and it doesn't add anything
| substantive to this conversation.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| >the oppressor
|
| It's a website that shows you what your friends are doing.
| That's it. People said the same things about television
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Yes people said the same thing about television and by and
| large most people think Television had some pretty bad side
| effects. A dumber society, all kinds of depression began
| manifesting in people who were sold an image of 'reality'
| via ads/unrealistic shows, the gutting of 'journalism' into
| 24-hour news, none of that stuff was wrong.
| md2020 wrote:
| That's simplifying it a lot.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| There has been tons of use for it for hate, but people
| have found a way to use every method of communication for
| hate (e.g. TV, Mail, phones) and efforts to crack down on
| hate on Facebook haven't seemed to have an effect on hate
| in the real world (see the people banned from Facebook
| who went on to use other platforms to coordinate 1/6). I
| don't like their privacy intrusions but people seem to
| have a tendency to blame all of society's ills on
| Facebook, phones, and the internet and that in and of
| itself is a massive oversimplification that doesn't
| reflect the real issues with our society
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's also global targeted advertisement delivery network
| who tracks user around the internet without consent?
| barbazoo wrote:
| It's so much more and if you spend a significant amount of
| time on HN then you know it.
| cirgue wrote:
| And they were right, no?
| mandmandam wrote:
| >That's it.
|
| It really, really isn't all they're doing. Not by the
| longest of shots.
|
| Here is one example: https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-
| evil-and-i-quit-215105...
|
| There are thousands of others. Every week on here there's a
| new story about some new uncovered act of heinous evil from
| the Zuck and his buds. It's a wonder you haven't seen them.
| bawolff wrote:
| Talk about shooting the messanger.
|
| All the bad people still exist. Its not like fb the platform
| solely created them or that they will just go away if that
| particular platform disappeared.
| blibble wrote:
| it's not shooting the messenger because it's a curated
| experience to maximise ad revenue
|
| and should be regulated as such
| bawolff wrote:
| So? Do you think its the only curated experience to
| maximize ad revenue on the internet (not to mention the non
| digital world).
|
| If you want to argue underregulated capitalism is bad, by
| all means, but lets not pretend that there aren't hundreds
| of websites waiting to take facebook's place if fb's
| downtime went on for more than a few days.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Your experience must be very different from mine. My Facebook
| feed is full of interesting pictures from my friends. It's only
| when I visit HN that I find lots of hatred and bile... for
| Facebook.
| practice9 wrote:
| HN is one of the most sceptical places on the internet, which
| I find interesting as it's just a news aggregator for people
| in software.
| starik36 wrote:
| > so much hate, arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful
| messaging on FB platforms
|
| And yet, you are still on them.
| Bud wrote:
| It's like that scene in approximately 500,000 movies where, for
| just a moment, it is revealed that the immortal arch-villain
| actually has a weakness, and can be killed.
| neemsio wrote:
| I saw some teenagers sitting on a field and talking instead of
| on their phones this afternoon. Was a pleasant surprise
| xwdv wrote:
| Nature was healing.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Facebook is very far from perfect, but it brings a lot of good
| to the world as well. I met my partner of almost five years
| thanks to Facebook's friend recommendation algorithms. I had
| never met them outside of Facebook and we didn't have any
| friends in common outside Facebook either. In fact, when we
| met, we lived on opposite coasts.
|
| I will always be grateful to Zuck & Co. for that, and for the
| hundreds of other friends I've made on Facebook - people of all
| ages, backgrounds, professions, and nationalities - people I
| never have, and almost certainly never WOULD have, met in
| "real" life. In my experience & opinion as an 8+ year high
| volume shitposter, Facebook is the best site in the world for
| dating and for expanding your social horizons/circle
|
| And I say that as a former frontend lead at Ghostery, lol
| enkid wrote:
| I think the question is, how do you keep the good and get rid
| of the bad? I think there's a lot of great things that social
| media has done to connect people, but all too often it's only
| a shallow or artificial connection. I think the other problem
| is that social media will make you find people "like" you.
| Humans have always sought that out, but there was always some
| variance that allowed us to remember that others unlike us
| were still human. Now, with connections possible the world
| over, we ironically are more likely to only interact with
| individuals that share our opinions because it's a lot easier
| to find people like that when you can search the entire world
| for it. That leads to otherization of any who doesn't share
| that opinion. So, how do we create social media that keeps
| that potential for connection you are talking about, but does
| it in a meaningful way where individuals are exposed to more
| than an echo chamber?
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Don't read political posts from sources you do not
| know/trust?
| prawn wrote:
| I don't use Facebook so I'm only going by what I've seen
| from screenshots or over someone's shoulder. Isn't one
| part of the misery political posts from people you _do_
| know? e.g., extended family or old friends going off the
| deep end?
| viscanti wrote:
| Anyone capable of that level of introspection is unlikely
| to be someone who is on the wrong end of misinformation.
| If the solution is for everyone to identify
| misinformation and to block it, then the criticisms of
| social media platforms are legitimate. Only those who are
| the least likely to be effected would be the ones opting
| out.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's just like YouTube. They need to tweak the algorithms
| for quality, not just quantity. Those are hard decisions
| for them because it will cost money in the short term.
| Ultimately governments will slap them down, which will cost
| much more.
| snuser wrote:
| facebook drove your other options to suicide
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| man and here I thought they just blocked me
| lysozyme wrote:
| Facebook may bring "a lot of good to the world", but it
| brings a lot of bad, too. Is it worth the tradeoff?
| indianpianist wrote:
| Yes. The same is applicable to every social networking
| site.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Or media or practically everything else
| [deleted]
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Imagine that you could maybe met someone better if you have
| not settled for FB recommendation.
| asd4232 wrote:
| "Facebook is the best site in the world for dating and for
| expanding your social horizons/circle"
|
| Maybe for boomers and some emerging markets. It appears to be
| losing popularity very fast among younger folks in most
| Western countries. Not that alternatives are much better IMO,
| Twitter in particular is even worse.
|
| Nothing beats going out and talking to real people. It gives
| you a competitive advantage over the masses that are too lazy
| to socialize in real world.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| I'm a boomer; that may well be a fair point
|
| I do think Facebook has something really valuable over in
| person interaction: you can observe how a potential SO
| interacts with a wide variety of other people
|
| Also, I like that it's async. But that's more of a personal
| preference
| kilroy123 wrote:
| How do you date on Facebook? I barely ever use it these days,
| but I would never connect with strangers on there.
|
| I feel like I'm missing something here.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Friend randoms and get to know them over time through
| public wall interactions; switch to DMs if things are
| clicking
|
| I've sent thousands of FB friend requests to strangers
| suggested by the algo; the vast majority accept. I have met
| some of my favorite people in the world this way. Also some
| huge assholes/crazies, of course. Sometimes they are the
| same people
| jimsimmons wrote:
| Proof by anecdote
| jamiequint wrote:
| Did you get confused and think "There is so much hate,
| arguments, misinformation, angy, and harmful messaging on
| FB platforms." was data?
| missedthecue wrote:
| If it agrees with my priors it's objective fact. If else,
| it's an anecdote
| jimsimmons wrote:
| If you keep up with current affairs the past few weeks
| have shown that FB's alleged problems are supported by
| data which is disregarded by it's leadership
| gabyar wrote:
| Not a proof. But a useful anecdote.
|
| No one is doing large scales studies of how many people
| meet their partner on FB, so anecdote is all we have for
| that.
|
| Most of the criticisms are also anecdotes, but you seem
| fine with those.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| It's just my experience, but I am not very special or
| unusual, so it would be surprising if many people haven't
| had similar experiences
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you feel that Facebook is really that detrimental to your
| online existence, there are easier (and more persistent) ways
| for you to block them out of your life.
| spike021 wrote:
| I think people could really work on self-curating/self-
| filtering content to make sure it's mostly what they want to
| see on social media.
|
| I've made nearly a dozen friends in Japan who I've now met
| there on two separate trips purely through a shared interest by
| connecting on Instagram.
|
| I rarely see content that I don't expect or care to see.
| asciimov wrote:
| The problem for me, and many others, is we are friends with
| people on the complete opposite political spectrum. I don't
| have the granularity to block their political posts while
| still being able to see their regular posts.
| filoleg wrote:
| This sounds more like an issue when it comes to interacting
| with those people in general, regardless of the medium. I
| bet those friends would still bring up their political
| views in irrelevant conversations irl, on twitter, or
| literally everywhere else they socialize.
|
| This isn't a fault on the part of FB. You indicated you are
| friends with those people and want to follow their content.
| If you want to be friends with them on FB, but not see
| their content pop up on your timeline, that option is a
| click away. If you want more granular filtering, so that
| you can still see non-political posts from those people,
| you need to indicate to the algorithm that you want less of
| that by clicking "show me less posts like this", and it
| will eventually learn.
|
| I see those options as a reasonable approach, as I struggle
| to come up with a better way to filter the content of
| people you follow with such granularity. The only option I
| can see in my mind that would work better is literally
| having someone work as your personal "filter", so that they
| can only show you the posts you want from those people. But
| that, obviously, is not a viable approach.
|
| It's just like in real life. If you have a friend who you
| want to continue socializing with, but in public settings
| they say extremely off-putting things half the time that
| you don't want to hear, your options are to either stop
| socializing with them completely (aka unfollowing), to ask
| them to stop doing it, and that's pretty much it. All of
| those options are available on facebook as well, except
| facebook offers even more options that are all pretty good.
|
| And I am saying this as someone who opens facebook at most
| once-twice a week for a little bit of time, just to check
| up on what my friends post and to read thru a few
| interesting discussions in the hobby groups I am in. If I
| occasionally see a wild political shitpost, I just click
| "show me less content like this". And the algorithm,
| surprisingly enough, tends to adjust to this pretty well.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Getting "Query Error" if I click Notifications and after
| dismissing it, it keeps coming back.
| cephei wrote:
| Does HN have any Facebook integrations that could have caused the
| slowness seen earlier? Or it could be that some part of the
| network infrastructure is shared between the two and was
| overloaded.
| [deleted]
| imgabe wrote:
| It's giving an SSL error for me.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| As much as I dislike Facebook, my father died yesterday and
| listening to some of the relatively unknown folk musicians that
| he had shared on there over the years meant a lot to me today.
| tracyhenry wrote:
| And HackerNews seems to be much faster as soon as FB is back up.
| Not sure if this is just me.
| Wistar wrote:
| Yes. This seems to me to be true.
| actusual wrote:
| I'm experiencing this as well.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Probably Facebook trackers. I noticed a lot of apps (including
| my own) having major slowness on initial load while they were
| down. My assumption is it was their tracking code timing out.
| tempestn wrote:
| It was probably due to the global DNS system being overloaded
| due to people and apps repeatedly retrying facebook
| connections. Cloudflare reported 30x normal DNS requests for
| FB properties.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
| tekromancr wrote:
| But HN doesn't have any facebook trackers
| mandmandam wrote:
| I wonder how sure we can be of that.
| Renaud wrote:
| Hit F12 on your browser and look at the network traffic.
| HN only loads a handful of files: the html page, a style
| sheet, a JavaScript file and a few GIFs for the arrows
| and faveicon.
|
| The JS is uncompressed and very readable. It only
| contains logic for site use, no code to call back some
| other trackers.
|
| A perfect example of site that doesn't need to use
| client-side analytics to sell ads.
| elromulous wrote:
| True for me as well. What would explain this? Does hn use some
| tracking from FB? Not trying to throw shade, but this is a
| surprising correlation.
| leoc wrote:
| Could it just be people pounding HN for any update on
| Facebook?
| threevox wrote:
| That's what I saw claimed, but that wouldn't go away the
| very second Facebook came online again
| sulam wrote:
| A non-trivial percentage of HN visitors also read FB.
| Absent FB, they likely spent more time on HN.
| joshmanders wrote:
| All the devices on the planet with Facebook owned apps
| installed having no concept of backoff retries and people
| constantly refreshing trying to figure out why Facebook isn't
| loading was pegging the crap out of DNS resolvers, slowing
| down queries for other legitimate requests too.
|
| Once they came back online and their DNS was resolving, it
| alleviated all that pressure.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Maybe HN servers share room with something that got pinned
| down with requests when FB was down? E.g. 100000s of devices
| doing a login retry loop for some app since FB auth. doesn't
| work, or something.
| renaudg wrote:
| DNS resolvers worldwide being bombarded with retries from
| clients trying to reach FB.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Yes, from New Zealand it is now normal speed.
| paganel wrote:
| No, you're not the only one, I noticed the same thing. In fact,
| immediately after reading and checking that FB is up I came
| back to the HN tab, reload it and it was way faster compared to
| a few minutes ago when FB was still down.
| EGreg wrote:
| Telegram was down for me too
|
| WhatsApp is still down
|
| Something else is actually going on...
| Bud wrote:
| That doesn't mean something else is going on. It means that
| there are a lot of us who are web addicts who were
| temporarily deprived of our Zucker-smack and desperately
| flailed about in the rest of the web for a fix until our
| main dose got restored.
|
| As for WhatsApp, that is of course a FB property.
| shuntress wrote:
| Once it came back people stopped mashing refresh on the related
| HN threads.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Same.... was it a global DNS issue or was HN overloaded from
| everybody looking for updates?
| tempestn wrote:
| From a cloudflare blog post on this, their public DNS
| resolvers were getting 30x their usual traffic. Presumably
| that was the case for DNS resolvers everywhere, so that would
| explain a slowdown:
|
| > But that's not all. Now human behavior and application
| logic kicks in and causes another exponential effect. A
| tsunami of additional DNS traffic follows.
|
| > This happened in part because apps won't accept an error
| for an answer and start retrying, sometimes aggressively, and
| in part because end-users also won't take an error for an
| answer and start reloading the pages, or killing and
| relaunching their apps, sometimes also aggressively.
|
| ... > So now, because Facebook and their sites are so big, we
| have DNS resolvers worldwide handling 30x more queries than
| usual and potentially causing latency and timeout issues to
| other platforms.
|
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
|
| Edit: Although looking at the graph on that page, it appears
| that only DNS requests for FB properties increased 30x, so
| that last sentence appears to be misleading. Regardless, a
| significant overall increase.
| amelius wrote:
| > their public DNS resolvers were getting 30x their usual
| traffic
|
| But why does my browser need to do a DNS lookup every time
| I request a page from HN? It's not like the IP address
| changes every 5 minutes.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Because hackernews sets their TTL to 5 minutes:
|
| dig +noauthority +noquestion +nostats
| news.ycombinator.com @ns-225.awsdns-28.com.
|
| news.ycombinator.com. 300 IN A 209.216.230.240
| lupire wrote:
| It doesn't. But when Facebook DNS is missing, users ask
| for it many times because they have nothing to cache.
|
| This adds load than get block other queries.
| tempestn wrote:
| Short answer is because they've set their DNS TTL to 5
| minutes: https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=a%3a
| news.ycombin...
|
| As for why, you'd have to ask them. It could be to allow
| for relatively quick DNS failover in the case of an
| outage. Or if using a proxy like Cloudflare, that
| provider could prefer short DNS TTLs to have flexibility
| in their routing.
| Macha wrote:
| Surely the moment facebook comes back up would be higher
| traffic as people rush to comment on it (see this thread's
| rapid rise).
|
| Best guess: there's a DNS dependency in HN's critical path
| somewhere and the DNS server they used was being hammered
| with the facebook dns lookup retries.
| sulam wrote:
| Nah, unauthenticated HN was working very fast. It was
| simply the amount of traffic HN got while FB was down.
|
| Here's a crazy idea: maybe a lot of HN people also spend
| time on FB during the day. When FB was down, they had more
| time to spend on HN!
| desertraven wrote:
| Perhaps more people visiting HN during the Facebook blackout?
| jeffbee wrote:
| So, experts, someone explain why it would take half a day to
| advertise your routes. What did they need to do?
| PeterCorless wrote:
| 1. Get physical access to the systems; employee badges were
| also offline, so they needed to bring in a _different_ set of
| people with physical access to the premises.
|
| 2. Login directly to their systems and update the A-name
| record.
|
| 3. A-name records do not take effect immediately. There's a
| propagation delay as other DNS services accept the domain name.
|
| 4. Any sort of "damage assessment" to check the conditions of
| the now-offline systems. [Not a gating factor; you can turn
| things on, but you are likely doing "blast radius" analysis in
| parallel.]
|
| 5. Restart services one-by-one. Web servers, databases, API
| gateways, etc.
|
| 6. Allow external access; turn the systems back on for the
| world. [This is where they are currently, even though some
| parts of Facebook do not seem to be working too well. i.e.,
| uploads and new posts seem broken still; at least they were for
| me.]
| jeffbee wrote:
| It doesn't sound to me like this was a DNS outage. Their
| records existed but their name servers were unreachable
| because they'd withdrawn their BGP route. So I don't think
| the rest of your comment is really consistent with the
| available information.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Not an expert, but I have some theories:
|
| 1. Since all internal comms runs through email, messenger, and
| other systems all run under facebook.com, communication and
| coordination must have been extremely difficult.
|
| 2. eBGP servers/appliances that can serve 3 billion users must
| take a while to spin up. Assuming there was no cache, it would
| have to register thousands of internal services.
|
| 3. Per a now deleted reddit thread, the people who pushed the
| change and knew how to fix it weren't able to be onsite at the
| data center, so they were flying blind and working with lower
| level techs trying to implement their instructions.
|
| 4. DNS is usually heavily cached at multiple layers, but today
| they were getting DDOS'ed with DNS requests from FB clients.
| They would probably have to block those requests while the
| service is coming online so it doesn't just melt down again,
| and have some method of slowly allowing requests. How? IDK.
| Maybe host by host.
|
| 5. Whatever the case, some of the world's most sophisticated,
| highest paid engineers were under the gun to solve at
| $3000/second problem. I have to assume they were working as
| fast as they could.
| dclaw wrote:
| Booooo
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Did this have any impact on Occulus users? I know the big
| Facebook login controversy -- this might have been a good example
| of why that's a horrible idea.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| FB services were down, and new device registration was
| unavailable, but the devices can be used offline, so this
| didn't brick them
| Duralias wrote:
| However, most multiplayer games did not work and those that
| did could not get your username.
|
| And for some reason games failed to appear in libraries for
| the first 10-15 minutes after starting a Quest, the entries
| for the games just didn't appear.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Judging by the list of people complaining on /r/oculus/, yes,
| Oculus was down as well.
| GrifMD wrote:
| I'm seeing an unusual amount of reddit style small comments on
| this outage, which I find strange. They're short and in the vein
| of "Facebook is down: good" or "Facebook is back up: damn nothing
| good lasts forever"
|
| I understand the distain for Facebook as a business, but still
| this is pretty low effort.
| spelunker wrote:
| You should see the current top comment!
| literallyaduck wrote:
| The public is tired of being gaslighted and lied to by large
| corporations.
|
| The whistle-blower only brought to light what we have known
| previously, Facebook is a net loss for humanity.
|
| Letting people contect with family and long lost friends is
| good.
|
| Purposefully pitting people against each other, human
| experimentation
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
| , creating hateful echo chambers, claiming to be the source of
| all facts, manipulating users for engagement and ad revenue is
| bad.
|
| The low effort posts could signify a loss of cultural cohesion
| or new accounts, but Facebook and its children fading from the
| public would be a gift to many addicts.
| mahathu wrote:
| In Germany, each year a committee of linguists select an "un-
| word of the year". "Gaslit" should be the internet unword of
| the decade. It has no scientific relevance and shouldn't be
| used when perfectly fine alternatives like "lied to" or
| "manipulated" exist. They just don't sound as dramatic I
| guess.
| 0x4d464d48 wrote:
| What's wrong with the idea of treating gaslighting as a
| certain kind of manipulation?
| batch12 wrote:
| I agree that the misuse is annoying-- and a Lot of people
| misuse the word. However, gaslighting has a specific
| meaning not quite covered by "lied to" or "manipulated".
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Interesting how low quality comments seem to be correlated with
| FB going down :)
| yuuu wrote:
| order corn
| yuuu wrote:
| sudo order corn
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| Maybe it's because Facebook has become more than a business and
| has wormed its way into places where it has no business being?
|
| A ton of small city _governments_ in the US do announcements
| and such on Facebook these days. One columnist is advocating
| giving the a seats at the United Nations, and does not get
| immediately laughed out of the room by the editor [1].
|
| It's really hard to practically escape their reach, all the
| "How I left Facebook and it was really great" posts
| notwithstanding. Being digital Henry David Thoreaus is not a
| scalable strategy.
|
| So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral
| articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform
| and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it
| are...gone, albeit only temporarily.
|
| I must confess that I myself felt this kind of relief. I
| secretly hoped that it would stay down; and that we'd get to
| rebuild a kinder, more honest, and open social media platform
| or platforms.
|
| --------------------
|
| [1]
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-03/give-a...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Sure, this might be true but you're diverting from the point
| OP is making. May be it's that HN has lost it's ability to
| have a civil discourse without people downvoting you for the
| slightest challenging opinion, let alone contrarian
| viewpoints (which would be flagged). It used to be not like
| that just two years ago. It is very much reflecting a low
| effort echo-chamber.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| And how simple it actually was, just turn off the sites. Like
| a giant global, societal parental control setting.
|
| Here I thought that this snake had wrapped itself entirely
| around all of us, but it really didn't. All we have to do is
| 'flick', turn it off. Body image issues on Insta? Not today
| kids.
|
| How simple some of our biggest problems are to solve. It does
| make one hopeful.
| ngold wrote:
| How private companies like Twitter and Facebook took over
| official government communication is rather lazy, and
| destructive to an open society.
| throwaway468236 wrote:
| In the UK the COVID vaccine was offered nationally through a
| government site but you could get it sooner and closer
| through local GPs. They could stop once they had covered the
| old and vulnerable though. In my area, they carried on for a
| while but only if you requested an appointment in the
| comments of a private Facebook group.
|
| I wasn't thrilled by the delay, but also thought the
| assumption of vaccine hesitancy from others in the meantime
| and hard to navigate process could put some off entirely.
|
| But for everyone else, what a sign-up incentive!
| drstewart wrote:
| >So I tend to take the low effort comments as a visceral
| articulation of the relief felt at knowing that the platform
| and the conspiracy theories and such spreading on it
| are...gone, albeit only temporarily.
|
| That's funny, because most of what I read while Facebook was
| down was conspiracy theories about Facebook being down.
| fosk wrote:
| After all, Facebook is down, so those comments have to go
| somewhere.
| jimsimmons wrote:
| This is a live event unfolding and that's pretty much all
| there's to it. So it's like a twitch chat. Deeper discussions
| will follow when the postmortems come out
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, and as a submission I don't really see the point in it?
| Especially when it's not even a status page permalink (couldn't
| be, that was down too apparently). Post mortems very welcome of
| course. It's just karma bait as far as I can tell, and as you
| say, almost entirely uninteresting comments.
|
| There are/were a couple of other at least briefly front page
| submissions around it of e.g. twitter/reddit potentially-leaked
| minor bits of info, and krebsonsecurity post; I'm sure the few
| informed more interesting comments would've found their way to
| those without a 'it is down, here is a link that will soon be
| up again' mega-thread.
|
| Which leads me to a meta-point on this submission: I've flagged
| it, because AIUI it's customary that the initial 'down'
| submission gets renamed 'was down', rather than having the two
| 'down'/'up' threads.
| callalex wrote:
| Useless comments don't make the topic being discussed useless
| to know about. This outage has arguably impacted more human
| lives than any other in computing history. I can't back that
| up with facts yet, but you must agree it is a notable event
| for this community that has had ripples across the internet
| and real life.
| honksillet wrote:
| Let's this be a reminder to delete me your Facebook apps.
| azta6521 wrote:
| I wished facebook would have been down for a week and people
| would get a glimpse into a different world.
| coolspot wrote:
| They just would switch to TikTok/Snapchat/Friendster.
| chidog12 wrote:
| The Post-mortem is gonna be guarded by 24/7 manned security lol
| DocFeind wrote:
| Not really though
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| Logged in for the first time in a while to check if it works -
| still getting errors but the DNS seems to be resolving now.
|
| I think HN might've caused another outage by hugging it to death
| like many other websites that landed on the front page.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It's the billions of people who have been trying to use it all
| day logging in and trying to update their feeds and catch up on
| what they missed that's slowing it down, not the small city of
| nerds clicking the title through HN. Facebook (and subsidiaries
| like Instagram hosted in the same DCs) normally receive more
| requests per minute than HN receives in a month.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Hacker News speed sure bounced back fast!
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The site is up but I'm still getting query errors and other
| issues.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Welcome back AS32934.
|
| A little bit of Internet history just happened -- has so much
| traffic ever stopped and started in such a short period of time?
|
| Somewhere, one more happily undulating circadian egress graph
| just had a whopping exponential decay chunk taken out of it. How
| close to 0 did it get? What void lies below the graph? Elder
| gods? Blank packetless skree? The Great Quiet? We may never know
| -- it's noisy again now and will never get quieter.
|
| Long may these events continue. The Internet was never meant to
| work all the time, it was meant to take a pummelling, say
| _whatever_ , and carry on regardless.
| entropyneur wrote:
| Wow, I never realized Facebook was causing so much psychological
| discomfort in so many people. Either we are using different
| Facebooks or you guys need therapy and do not track plugin.
| oefnak wrote:
| My discomfort is solely in other people using it, and the
| effect it has on them.
| joelbondurant wrote:
| The USA Fact-Check Algorithm from the Science Ministry was
| installed.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| WhatsApp is still down for me, anyone else?
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Just came back up for me
| actusual wrote:
| Still down here.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| ~sort of~
|
| Some features, like adding new posts or uploading photos are
| having problems. You can likely read your feed now, but updates
| will be wonky for some hours to come.
| eruci wrote:
| No. It is still down.
| doener wrote:
| https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1445155265360416773?s=21
| advpetc wrote:
| Instagram isn't fully functional, for me I cannot post story..
| Reason077 wrote:
| And WhatsApp still appears to be completely down.
| coolca wrote:
| What is Facebook ?
| anonymfus wrote:
| A website to be in touch with your friends by keeping a list of
| them and sharing pictures, texts and events, which is famous
| for its developers discovering that the worse it does its core
| functions, the more money it brings, where people are forced to
| spend more time to do simple things because UI is intentionally
| bad and AI mixes in the content it founds the most distracting
| into your feed together with ads.
| Reason077 wrote:
| WhatsApp is still down. 22:36 GMT
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Well everyone, that was a small glimpse into what it's like when
| shitty third world countries just turn off the internet. Combine
| and centralize more everyone.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| > shitty third world countries
|
| let's tease out your imperialistic racism more. which countries
| are you talking about?
| runawaybottle wrote:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2021/3/3/mapping-
| internet...
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| so 29 countries are "shitty" according to you?
| rodmena wrote:
| Nothing important for the world. But at least the employees could
| be able to enter the building.
| zwog wrote:
| That's a pretty ignorant statement. Facebook and its services,
| especially Whatsapp, are the most widespread form of
| communication in many countries. Particularly in
| poor/developing countries, hardly anything else is used because
| mobile Internet is available cheaply, unlike voice services and
| SMS. Whatsapp is indispensable there.
|
| See https://www.statista.com/statistics/291540/mobile-
| internet-u... for example.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| If Facebook wasn't there monetizing their data to keep them
| in poverty maybe an open source tool would be instead.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's an argument against the Facebook Empire, not an
| argument for it.
|
| Economies and comms infra should not have a single point of
| failure - clearly.
| grzracz wrote:
| Can't wait for the post mortem technical post
| this_user wrote:
| Allegedly, this was a BGP update gone wrong that locked out
| their remote access. And the people with physical access didn't
| have the necessary privileges to fix the issue.
| avaika wrote:
| There's some explanation by CloudFlare available [0]. But for
| sure that'd be interesting to read facebooks version.
|
| [0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Facebook, unlike other big tech companies, has no financial
| incentive to share postmortems. Others are bound by SLA
| agreements with business customers.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Well, as someone that has an app that had degraded
| performance due to their SDK failing to talk to Facebook
| servers. I FOR ONE would really like an explanation.
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Then collaborate with your peers to get enough leverage
| over Facebook to demand this.
|
| It's not like FB's market position let's them dictate terms
| in an unfair way that would require a certain governing
| force to step in and rebalance the tables......
|
| /s
| renaudg wrote:
| FB does have business customers with (at least) Workplace.
| Hence the name of this dashboard.
| itomato wrote:
| Zuck is writing it now.
| type_Ben_struct wrote:
| If past outages are anything to go by there's no chance of this
| seeing the light of day.
| infini8 wrote:
| This one in particular seems interesting. Felt like one of
| the longer outages with soo many different sites effected.
| paxys wrote:
| This one will definitely see the light of day considering how
| big a deal it is. Shareholders could easily sue over it.
| drusepth wrote:
| What makes you think shareholders could sue over this
| outage without knowing the cause?
| paxys wrote:
| They could sue over Facebook not telling them the cause
| otterley wrote:
| Shareholders aren't entitled to know every detail of a
| company's operations, including why outages occur.
| weeeeelp wrote:
| Here's hoping to a whistleblower...
| devmunchies wrote:
| mark accidentally logged out. first time he'd done it since it
| started.
| throwdecro wrote:
| Who's "mark"?
| powersurge360 wrote:
| Refers to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
| alexilliamson wrote:
| And Founder of Our Feast!
| trump1sb4ck wrote:
| Trump is _also_ BACK on Facebook!
|
| https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/
|
| Hooray!
| travoc wrote:
| It's not.
| trump1sb4ck wrote:
| Trump 2024
|
| https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/
| digitist wrote:
| not really though
| TomasEkeli wrote:
| shucks
| umbula wrote:
| ...and it's gone.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They did it!
| daniaal wrote:
| Instagram, Facebook and messenger working for me. Whatsapp still
| down though, for me anyway. Cant like or comments posts. I get
| this message in dev tools: "A server error field_exception
| occured."
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(page generated 2021-10-04 23:00 UTC)