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> This is fucking bananas. For nearly a decade, Facebook has been at the forefront of innovating how code is deployed at global scale. They presumably have grad
by johnvanommen 8y ago
> This is fucking bananas. For nearly a decade, Facebook has been at the forefront of innovating how code is deployed at global scale. They presumably have gradual rollouts, automated rollbacks, anomaly detection, not to mention (I assume) loads of organizational safeguards in place to ensure this sort of thing never happens.
> Something else happened. This was not a configuration issue. Edit: If it was, I'd expect a post-mortem post-haste.
I've worked on automation projects at a large scale, and Facebook uses an unusual and clever method to deploy their software: BitTorrent.
I can only speculate about why FB went down yesterday. But if you understand that it's being deployed via BT, you can see that there's the potential to have a lengthy rollback window.
IE, this isn't like uninstalling a single RPM; this could have impacted a significant fraction of their fleet of systems, across multiple datacenters, and if so, the amount of data they'd need to move to rollback could have been tremendous.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-use-BitTorrent-to-copy-binaries https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-use-BitTorrent-to-co...
- ajsharp 8y agoI totally agree with all this, and I'm completely open to a valid technical explanation here. My initial comment is/was admittedly a bit reactive, and more so to the general tone of their explanation than the likelihood of a legitimate technical explanation. This wasn't one service -- every product was down for nearly 24 hours, and their explanation is basically, "uh, yea, it was a...um...configuration issue." The terseness of that explanation, in my opinion, is insulting to the millions of people and businesses that rely on facebook to get information and operate their businesses.