[HN Gopher] What happened on the Internet during the Facebook ou...
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What happened on the Internet during the Facebook outage
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 107 points
Date : 2021-10-08 15:17 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| Hokusai wrote:
| > The robots went silent. What about the traffic coming to our
| CDN sites from Facebook User-Agents? The gap is indisputable. We
| see about 30% of a typical request rate hitting us. But it's not
| zero; why is that? We'll let you know a little secret. Never
| trust User-Agent information; it's broken. User-Agent spoofing is
| everywhere.
|
| That is an interesting way of finding out how many spoof
| connections exist for Facebook and who the spoofers are. Just
| take down Facebook and all the traffic that says to be Facebook
| is spoofing. Simple as that.
| jefftk wrote:
| It's not necessarily spoofing. During the outage you could
| still open the FB app, at least on Android, and it would show
| you cached content. By default it opens links in the FB
| Browser, which was probably still working during the outage. So
| it shouldn't go to zero.
|
| Example in-app browser UA, pulled from my server logs just now:
| Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; Pixel 3 XL
| Build/RQ3A.210905.001; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
| Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Mobile Safari/537.36
| [FB_IAB/FB4A;FBAV/337.0.0.32.118;]
| cldellow wrote:
| I don't think the user agents under discussion are the UAs
| sent by the Facebook browser, but rather the ones sent by
| Facebook's crawlers.
|
| The Facebook browser is distributed across all of humanity,
| so it'd be expected to have legitimate activity during the
| outage.
|
| The Facebook crawlers, however, are presumably all behind the
| blackholed Facebook network, so any request purporting to be
| from a Facebook crawler is likely up to no good.
| [deleted]
| addingnumbers wrote:
| You don't need anything to go down, just get a list of the
| subnets within their BGP ASN and filter those out, the rest are
| these spoofs. You can do this trivially at any time.
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yes. And we are using that information to better target those
| bots.
|
| But guess what? iMessage adds Facebot and Twitterbot to its
| User--Agent when getting a preview when you send someone a
| link.
|
| So, as ever, shit's complicated in the real world.
| detaro wrote:
| Interesting, but makes sense. want to do previews, look like
| a preview bot - presumably there's also some sites that serve
| preview metadata only to such user agents.
| hkchad wrote:
| Is anyone else just stick and tired of hearing about cloudflare?
| They actually make the internet worse for me.
| bagels wrote:
| Just endless captcha loops.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Have you tried not being a robot? Only robots would have this
| problem.
| moffkalast wrote:
| HAHA WHAT DO YOU MEAN, FELLOW HUMAN?
| georgyo wrote:
| You may be interested in privacy pass:
| https://privacypass.github.io/
|
| However if you are completely disabling cookies and
| connecting for a unreliable source (like a public wifi or
| TOR) then there is nothing to store that your session is
| trust worthy.
| Wallacy wrote:
| No.
| bserge wrote:
| Funny how absolutely nothing changed for me during this outage
| everyone, their grandmas and their dogs seem to be talking about.
| I don't use Facebook. And nothing of value was lost. Amazing how
| they're a multibillion dollar company.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Hacker News was offline. Does it need Facebook to work?
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It was not offline. It was pretty slow - some requests failed
| entirely - but only for authenticated users which suggests the
| problem was server/database capacity as the unauthenticated
| pages served from cache were still very fast.
| jlgaddis wrote:
| > _... the unauthenticated pages served from cache were still
| very fast._
|
| Wouldn't those have been coming from Cloudflare, though?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Hacker News has not used Cloudflare for some time.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344
| lmilcin wrote:
| It does not. But a lot of people flocked to HN to see what is
| going on or because they did not have their other alternative.
| Permit wrote:
| I don't buy this. My impression was that the slowness was
| sustained during the entire outage and then instantly let up
| once Facebook came back online.
|
| I'm really curious why this was the case.
| eecc wrote:
| Trackers?
| mysterydip wrote:
| At the time, people were saying the slowdown went away if
| you logged out. I wanted to comment on things, so I didn't
| try it.
| toast0 wrote:
| HN tends to slow down when there are very active discussion
| threads. The FB is down threads died down quite a bit when
| their site came back online. The threads for FB is back
| online had much sparser discussion.
|
| There's not a whole lot of mystery here.
| Permit wrote:
| Those threads weren't particularly active. They aren't
| even the most active threads in the last month: https://h
| n.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
|
| That said, I can't claim that those threads didn't have
| more readers than other threads. But I can't say they
| they did either.
|
| It also seems uniquely interesting that some people
| experienced the slowness but others did not.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you loaded in private browsing (or logged out), HN was
| speedy as normal. If you're like me, from time to time
| you accidentally sign out and don't notice it until much
| later.
| [deleted]
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| BGP side effect, like maybe FB DNS normally is answering
| (for some geographies) DNS queries reaching out to
| news.ycombinator.com ?
| gizmo385 wrote:
| Hacker News worked fine for me during the Facebook outage.
| wil421 wrote:
| Didn't work for me. The reason I figured out about FB being
| down was searching for HN being down.
| patall wrote:
| I learned on HN that Facebook etc. were down (at that very
| moment).
| erikerikson wrote:
| Worked for me too.
|
| Maybe though, GP is meta, about how psyops efforts moved
| elsewhere.
|
| Probably too silly but I found the thought fun. Hope you've
| enjoyed it too.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| I could browse fine, but the one time during the outage that
| I attempted to post a comment it timed out.
| tinuzzo wrote:
| Hacker News worked flawlessly for me. Maybe your network had an
| issue/
| jlgaddis wrote:
| IT'S NOT THE NETWORK!
|
| Sincerely,
|
| A Network Engineer
| bagels wrote:
| I definitely saw some error pages with the orange bar.
| YinglingLight wrote:
| Facebook was ensuring that they could shut down when the reveal
| happens. If you can't control the flow of communication, you
| cause an information blackout. Expect every major tech site to
| practice in the coming weeks as well.
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(page generated 2021-10-08 23:02 UTC)