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Facebook appears to be down.
A link for this submission? Really? But it is down, as in not working. Error 5 - something went wrong.
[chromas adds] From VOA:
Instagram is back up after suffering a partial outage for more than several hours, the photo-sharing social network platform said in a tweet, but its parent Facebook Inc.'s app still seemed to be down for some users around the globe.
Certain users had trouble in accessing widely used Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook apps earlier Wednesday, in one of the longest outages faced by the company in the recent past.
[...] A Facebook spokesman confirmed the partial outage, but did not provide an update. The social networking site had issues for more than 12 hours, according to its developer's page.
Facebook took to Twitter to inform users that it was working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and confirmed that the matter was not related to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:16PM (12 children)
I'm speculating here, but I wouldn't be surprised if the real story looked something like: Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Spectrum, and/or another telecom went to Facebook last week and said "Nice website you have there, it would be a real shame if something happened to it. We can make sure nothing happens to it for $X. Of course, if you were to tell anybody about our little chat here, something might happen to it." That's been in their plans ever since they put Ajit Pai in as FCC chair, and there's no reason to think that they wouldn't carry it out.
Either that or someone has a DDOS botnet that's much larger than anything we've seen before.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:28PM (10 children)
I'm speculating too, but I'm going in the direction that some devops moron deployed broken code into production.
Alternatively, there may have been some BGP [wikipedia.org] screwups/shenanigans that routed Facebook traffic off into oblivion.
Given that Facebook has multiple datacenters, with dozens of peering agreements, it's unlikely that even a bunch of ISPs could take Facebook down like this. More's the pity.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday March 14 2019, @12:40PM
BGP screwups/shenanigans get picked up and reported
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:30PM (3 children)
So Facebook has no QA tests for code deployments? Or what are you suggesting?
(Score: 3, Touché) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:45PM
Or is your reading comprehension that poor?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:50PM (1 child)
And it's happened before. Perhaps not at Facebook, but at plenty of other places.
Someone does something stupid and thinks they're in test when they're in production. It happens more often than you might think.
And what part of "speculating" didn't you understand?
Or haven't you had your coffee yet?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:40PM
Internal changes were the issue; blame inexperienced outsourced people following strict instructions that did not work. They in turn blamed employees because factually, they did what they were told to do and repeatedly pressing the button still didn't work. So they logged out and did something else and waited for someone to reply to emails about the issues they encountered. The next shift had no idea what was going on and also found that pressing the button still didn't work.
I always wanted to be an IT guy in India. It seems so blameless and easy.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @02:31PM
..but I heard they have an AI check all the code.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday March 14 2019, @04:38PM (1 child)
Maybe the Russians just switched on their "Great Firewall".
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/12/great-firewall-fears-as-russia-plans-to-cut-itself-off-from-internet [theguardian.com]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14 2019, @06:59PM
I read an article yesterday of Alexander Borisov making an HTML parser [lexbor.com]. In it was this:
Bold added by me.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:20PM (1 child)
Or a broken router, bad cable... it could be anything.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Funny) by NotSanguine on Thursday March 14 2019, @05:31PM
I'm guessing it's not coprolites [wikipedia.org]. Then again, you never know.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday March 14 2019, @01:18PM
A botnet of that capability, and network operator schenanegans of that level, would have been picked up by 3rd parties.