I'm curious about what comes to mind. Whether it is software related or otherwise, what does today's outage evoke for you?
What's the worst case scenario for Facebook?
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Top comments (41)
It probably has nothing to do with a rogue dependency, but this has maybe a 5% chance of fitting what happened
(Orig xkcd image xkcd.com/2347/ )
Edit: this is the actual thing that happened: blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-f...
It seems that some poor soul at fb issued a bunch of BGP withdrawal updates.
I've updated the pic, bringing it up to maybe a 90% change of being on the money
I had a similar thought when I heard about what happened:
😂
I thought it was DNS at first, too. It's kinda ironic that it ended up being a BGP problem. It's almost as if Facebook forgot how to be an internet company.
Interesting. I was looking into the BGP a few years back and I think we realized that that system would allow for massive hacks. It’s an ancient system that is poorly protected yet at the core of everything…
So it could be this was a mistake as they claim.
Or it would also be the first vector of attack a serious actor would use.
It’s exactly like this picture if the internet is a castle with many locks gates and controls then the BGP is the back door that someone left open.
As someone who hasn't used Facebook for nearly a decade (makes me feel old not gonna lie), I'm finding the effects of the outage on other people more interesting than the outage itself.
I wonder if anyone who uses these services will realize how much they actual spend on them. Or if they will find they don't really need/want them. (this is especially true for the social media apps)
Odds are most will just go back to their usual usage once its back up tho ;D
Probably the biggest shame of Facebook is how many restaurants, etc. closed down their websites and only have a Facebook. It's a shame bigger than one incident, but it's something to think about.
I think restaurants ditching menus for facebook is a symptom of something larger though. A lot of web dev agencies out there either won't work with projects the size of a restaurant menu, or will way over sell what is needed. Most restaurant's need a handful of static HTML pages to display basic info, something that could be done by a FE dev in less than a day. My first job tried to pitch a massive wordpress build with all kinds of stuff for like $50k to a local restaurant that just needed an online menu.
I can't blame those small businesses for ditching their costly websites and just throwing an FB page together, cheap and easy does it, and for web devs or agencies there's no money to be made anyway on these small websites, so I'd say win/win situation ...
I personally haven't ran into any restaurants with their menu being isolated only to Facebook. I've ran into more restaurants that have QR codes to get online menus during the pandemic. This doesn't include all those other restaurants that integrate with mobile ordering/delivery.
The on restaurant I know that has a weak online presence is actually thinking about closing shop 100% due to the stresses of the pandemic. However, even this place had integrated with mobile ordering/delivery.
Its possible I'm just avoiding those places, or where I live that just "isn't a thing", but I can see and understand there are places where that is more of the norm.
Why's that a shame if I may ask? As a small/medium size business an FB page seems an easy and practical way to get a web presence with minimal cost and effort - I'd say this is one of the most obvious "real" benefits of FB (most of the other benefits are mainly for the sake of FB's and Marc Z's pockets lol) ...
It's interesting for me because I didn't find out about it for hours since I apparently don't use any Facebook things, with the sole exception of the Quest 2 which requires an account... and as far as I know it was unaffected because it doesn't actually use Facebook in normal running. I gather I'm an exception.
Oh, and I got an email from a friend for the first time in so long it felt like a handwritten letter.
I used it as an opportunity to nag my friends about federated systems.
I think It's good time for people like me to argue why they don't use Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp 😅
Everyone is on fire while me ..
I use those services but I only really care about contacting people and good old SMS is still standing 😁
I think it's highlighted how often I passively open Facebook on my phone but also how little I usually take in when scrolling.
I've felt the whatsapp outage slightly more as that's my default messaging app but it's not hard to fall back to SMS.
I find it strange that all 3 services seem to have a single point of failure.
Kind of feels like the Internet as a whole is lacking in this regard. Other systems may or may not be more robust, but there just isn't as much diversity as there used to be in the world wide web.
I guess the next step would be a peer to peer DNS but that feels like a headache waiting to happen
It's always DNS.
We really need a better alternative...
A human guide..
I feel as though the timing on the release of the Pandora papers, and the case with a whistle blower trying to prove that facebook algorithmically prioritizes money over safety may have something to do with it. DNS and such seems like a distraction, but no way I’d be able to know for sure.
“Whistleblowers” which argue for censorship aren’t whistleblowers, they’re agents for the other side.
At no time in history has it been the good guys trying to suppress information. Every time it’s been the bad guys. And yes even the worst of the bad guys sold censorship to the population as something good if not necessary.
It’s like I’ve always said - you can lie about your intentions but you can’t hide your intentions. Someone’s intentions are encoded in their actions.
I've been shouting this from the virtual rooftops all day. This is my Epstein.
Convenient timing. I’m not doubting that there were DNS issues, but they easily could’ve been exaggerated to diminish coverage over the pandora papers, and gives facebook a chance to cover up anything.
From software perspective, - Oauth failures.
Facebook is a popular Oauth provider and if that is down , lot of customers who use Facebook to login are essentially locked out.
This is good time for developers to think about scenarios when/if major Oauth providers like Google,Facebook, Apple fail and create fallback mechanisms for account recovery.
I use Facebook as an example of “basic factors“ (or dissatisfiers, according to the Kano model). We‘ve come to expect social media to be always available. That doesn‘t make us particularly happy, we‘re just used to it. But when it‘s not available, it makes the news. Case in point today.
The interesting part for me is that we don’t even notice the change as it happens. Anybody remember the Twitter fail whale? Outages were much more common a few years ago.
Therapeutic.
That's what I thought of it. I mean nothing to worry about, there was no doubt a load of effort going to be thrown at it, perhaps as much as the US invests into hurricane relief as they mighty dollar needs saving as much as poor folk on floodplains in that grand old nation I'm confident. But the sort of thing that can hit any service any time, and on a bad day a load of them at once, and one really bad day lots and lots of them for a long time etc. And it's nice for folk to remember, that well, nothing is 24/7 forever ;-).
Besides, most other social media channels were up tod iscuss it (as was this one).
Looks like Facebooks BGP routing went "poof" just up in smoke... I am intrigued to find out exactly what happen. As things unravel.
Yes, this is going to be a fascinating retrospective.