Facebook

[robkelk]

AP, October 3: Facebook whistleblower alleges social network fed U.S. Capitol riot

CBC, October 4: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp hit by global outage

I'm not saying they're connected. I'm just saying this is the lead story in the national news in Canada today.

[Matrix Dragon]

No, it's much sadder than that. Word is that Facebook did the number one thing on the DO NOT tech support list. Everything online. Including the doors to the server room. And they all needed facebook to work. So, when the servers farted due to Facebook not updating their various things on time, no one could physically access the servers to turn them off and on again.

[classicdrogn]

That's a really impressive single point of failure, there. Wow.

[robkelk]

Cloudflare: Understanding How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet.

Apparently it was a set of Border Gateway Protocol issues. Without BGP, DNS stops working, and without DNS, there's no way for the Internet to connect to a network. (That's an oversimplification, but not a big one.)


As for commentary, there's this quote from We have some sad news about Facebook. It's coming back after six hours offline

How could a company of Facebook’s scale get BGP wrong? An early candidate is that aforementioned peering automation gone bad. The astoundingly profitable internet giant hailed the software as a triumph because it saved a single network administrator over eight hours of work each week.

Facebook employs more than 60,000 people. If a change designed to save one of them a day a week has indeed taken the company offline for six or more hours, that's quite something.

[Bob Schroeck]

I really do need to go back into my Facebook account and falsify as much as I can, just to poison their data on me.

[robkelk]

Opinion piece on The Register: The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time

tl;dr: Unlike the state-owned telcos of the 1950s, IBM of the 1960s, and Microsoft of the 1990s, Facebook is not an essential service. And all of those essential services were opened up and brought under regulation.

Unlike Microsoft, Amazon and Google, unlike the telcos and IBM, Facebook provides no essential services to business or state. Quite the opposite – it threatens, and it has money, but it has no leverage.