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I know this is tinhat territory, but it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes. The outage has pretty much buried that s

I know this is tinhat territory, but it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes. The outage has pretty much buried that story, and perhaps more importantly, stopped its spread on FB networks. That said, I can't see how FB managers and engineers would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally.

rootusrootus 5y ago
I assume this outage is costing millions per hour. And it's not exactly great advertising for Facebook, either. I doubt very much they would do something like this on purpose.
- ironlion624 5y ago
  Unless “they” were one or two disgruntled employees with the access, know-how, and motive to execute a “mistake”. Emphasis added.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    If it was intentional, that's serious jail time territory. That's a high price to pay for such limited downtime. I'm pretty sure an intentionally malicious actor with that type of access could do much worse things.
    - cheschire 5y ago
      I’m pretty sure the vast majority of entry level spy craft is about convincing people to do highly illegal and destructive things from a place of fear. Not saying this is the work of spies, just that it’s not unimaginable to think some middle manager could convince themselves or a subordinate to do something drastically illegal out of some fear that terrible things would happen otherwise.
    - xkeysc0re 5y ago
      I'm curious as to what law, exactly, they would be breaking. Sabotage in the US code is defined mostly in terms of war material and damages done to physical "national defense" properties. Certainly an employee would be fired and sued by the company, but is deliberately changing a routing policy (and not something like a worm or virus that deletes or otherwise degrades hardware and software) a crime?
      - bawolff 5y ago
        IANAL but I would assume computer fraud and abuse act: (5)(a)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
        xkeysc0re 5y ago
        In the cases cited under the CFAA (such as https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12454527986200733388 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=124545279862007...) it seems the employee deleted data and private info. In this case, no data was deleted or other computing property damaged it just became unreachable.
        ironlion624 5y ago
        That’s the one.
        pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
        The recent Van Buren decision would make that unlikely. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389500
      - ironlion624 5y ago
        Proof of intent is a significant burden placed upon prosecution. If that can be overcome, there’s legal precedent for criminal conviction namely under the CFAA. https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-computer/ https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-co...
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  Right, I know that, and I usually try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but man, Zuck doesn't make it easy. I'm just trying to process that FB is having its historic, all-networks global outage today of all days. And I bet FB would have paid double of whatever this will eventually cost them to make that story go away.
- gfosco 5y ago
  Dividing up last quarters $29B revenue leads to approximately $13.4M per hour of downtime, now past $53M after the 4 hour mark. But I haven't paid this much attention to Facebook in over a year.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    That doesn't make a lot of sense though - Facebook generates revenue primarily from ad traffic (on all sorts of sites). It needs to be up for reputation and to harvest ever more detail for 'improving' those ads, sure, but not for revenue. (Modulo blip from ads on its own site.) So you can't just divide over time like that.
    - fasteddie 5y ago
      What? It absolutely needs to be up -- those ads being served are on Facebook and Insta, not display banners on random sites.
      - OJFord 5y ago
        That's what I meant by 'ads on its own site' - but I was under the impression that Facebook generated most revenue from selling data/ads for display elsewhere (as well as on Facebook.com itself, and other subsidiaries). Perhaps I was wrong about that? Quick search shows up 'audience network', but I'm not sure to what extent that's what I was thinking of.
        bryan_w 5y ago
        Nope, for the most part all the ads that Facebook serves are for facebook owned sites and properties. They don't sell data, or have general ad placements on 3rd party websites.
        aerosmile 5y ago
        wow...
    - _hl_ 5y ago
kickopotomus 5y ago
Counterpoint: I had not even heard about the whistle-blower until seeing stories about the outage. One of the largest web services in the world being out of commission for multiple hours is a big deal in 2021. It's a top story on most news sites and other social media (e.g. here at HN, reddit, twitter). If you want something to pass under the radar, it's probably best to not attract global attention.
bool3max 5y ago
> That said, I can't see how FB managers and engineers would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally. They can either agree to comply with the orders from up above or they face consequences? How is that hard to comprehend?
nonsince 5y ago
Ah yes, the best way to bury a moral scandal of the kind that usually gets forgotten in a week is to undermine the trust of almost every single user worldwide. This is a very good conspiracy.
notyourwork 5y ago
That news broke ~12 hours ago right?
neom 5y ago
If I was so inclined to put on my conspiracy theorist robe, I’d guess more likely related to the bulk of Pandora Papers news hitting today.
- newbamboo 5y ago
  Or evergrande.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The outage has pretty much buried that story, Strongly disagree. The outage has millions of people entering "Facebook" into their search engines. Most engines will conveniently put related news at the top of the search results page. The most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower. Plus everyone has a lot of spare time to read the article now that Facebook and Instagram are down. The outage didn't bury the story. It amplified it. Any suggestions that Facebook did this on purpose don't even make sense.
- nwiswell 5y ago
  > recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower With respect I am pretty sure that the most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is this one. Holistically I agree that this isn't the kind of distraction Facebook wants, although it tickles me to imagine Mark in the datacenter going Rambo with a pair of wire cutters.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.
  - timdaub 5y ago
    Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-facebook-instagram-whatsapp/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    That is in no way gonna make people forget the whistleblower story - if anything, it's gonna increase the antipathy to having a single point of failure. Face it, everyone hates FB, even the people who spend the most time on it.
tdrdt 5y ago
Did the whistleblower reveal something we didn't know already? To me this seems like a million dollar mistake.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Did the whistleblower reveal something we didn't know already? A lot. The resulting Wall Street Journal series directly led to the shut down of Instagram for Kids.
- Levitz 5y ago
  I see it as similar to Snowden, in the sense that everybody kind of knew (actually guessed) but now we actually know. It doesn't come as a shock, but it's important information to have since it can be now argued with authority.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  The whistleblower revealed that Facebook knows it is bad for society. The documents also show Facebook actively optimizes its algorithms for "bad for society" content because that drives engagement which makes them more money. Furthermore Facebook doesn't do as much content moderation in regions/languages with low usage numbers because it costs more than those users make them. So calls for genocide in Myanmar basically go unchallenged and unmoderated because Facebook doesn't make much money in Myanmar. Sorry genocided minority, you should have been more valuable to Facebook.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes Could a pang of morality have struck one of the employees with the keys to the kingdom?
_yo2u 5y ago
I actually think most importantly it shows everyone what the world without FB is like ;)
irobeth 5y ago
FWIW, every article I've read has referenced the interview, and I personally find it hard to believe Facebook would be unaware of the Streisand Effect
joncrane 5y ago
I had no idea about the 60 Minutes thing until people started mentioning it in response to this outage.
- carbonx 5y ago
  Agree. I just did a quick check and 60 Minutes averages around 10 million viewers. It's not like in 1977 when something 20%+ of the US population was watching that show.
  - savoytruffle 5y ago
    It is pretty well available — and quickly — via piracy means, which I have always thought interesting for its somewhat esoteric content.
- this_user 5y ago
  Most people outside of the US don't even know what "60 Minutes" is. Even fewer have heard about that report. And even fewer care. But everyone has now heard about the outage. This would be the worst possible way of trying to stop the spread of the story. The more likely scenario is that this was the final straw for some disgruntled employee who decided to pull the plug on the entire thing.
  - indianpianist 5y ago
    > Most people outside of the US don't even know what "60 Minutes" is. I live in Australia. 60 Minutes exists here as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_prog...
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      arguing on the the basis of a strong cultural differentiation between the us and aus might not work as well as you think.
at-fates-hands 5y ago
It also looks like its much deeper than just people not finding the site. Employees are all locked out and there's another story on the front page on HN saying employees are locked out of the building as well. If you wanted to scrub a lot of the data and nefarious evidence the whistle blower brought out, this would be a great way to do it, under the guise of a simple "employee screw up" cover story. Its hard for me to think something more nefarious is afoot considering FB's track record with a myriad of other things. At this point, it seems more likely something sketchy is going on and not just some random employee who screwed up and brought down the entire network with a simple change. I would assume there are several layers of decision makers who oversee the BGP records. I have a hard time thinking one person had sole access to these and brought everything down with an innocent change. FB has too many smart people who would allow a single point of failure for their entire network such that if it goes down, it becomes "a simple error on the part of some random employee". This is not some junior dev who broke the build, its far more serious than that.
InitialLastName 5y ago
Not just that, but another story just broke about the sale of personal info on 1.5 billion FB users. Maybe this is just to cover the fact that they leaked information about 20% of the earth's population?
- wallawe 5y ago
  > they leaked information about 20% of the earth's population This is straight up false. It was scrapers extracting data from public profiles. They already incorporate anti-scraping techniques, so there's not much they can do other than require every one to set their profile to private.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    If you don't collect the data in one place, there's no chance of leaking it. If they want to position themselves as the global phonebook, that's fine, but they should be open about that. Edit to add: If you aren't in the "gather and sell access to everybody's data" business, "private" is a sensible default setting for that information. On the other hand, if you're Facebook...
    - JCharante 5y ago
      It's kinda in the name isn't it? Phonebook... Facebook...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
variant 5y ago
Hanlon's razor applies here, but it's a lot less fun. :)
nkozyra 5y ago
> I know this is tinhat territory, but it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes. It's not like this is a new thing. We've been getting [facebook does awful thing] news stories pretty consistently for years now.
thepasswordis 5y ago
If we're in "tinhat" territory: it seems extremely odd to me that this whistelblower seems to be "blowing the whistle" on the fact that facebook isn't doing enough to control what people are thinking and talking about. Like...what? "Brave whistelblower comes out showing that facebook isn't doing enough to control what you are thinking!" is sortof arguing past the question. Should facecbook be in charge of deciding what you think?
- DeRock 5y ago
  > this whistelblower seems to be "blowing the whistle" on the fact that facebook isn't doing enough to control what people are thinking and talking about. That is not at all what the whistleblower is alleging. Facebook already controls what content you are seeing through its news feed algorithm. The parameters to that algorithm are not a 1-dimensional "how much control", but instead uses engagement metrics for what content to show. The whistleblower claims that the engagement optimization, according to facebooks own research, prioritizes emotionally angry/hurtful/divisive content.
  - serial_dev 5y ago
    I didn't have the time to watch the interview yet but... wasn't it common knowledge for years? Is there anything else in the interview the whistleblower alleges, or can prove?
    - windowsrookie 5y ago
      We all knew Facebook is bad for society. The whistleblower showed us that Facebook has done internal studies and that these studies have shown their products are bad for society/contributed to the insurrection/promote human trafficking/damage teen mental health/etc. But even with these studies, Facebook has decided to prioritize growth and revenue, rather than fix the issues that are bad for society. What this whistleblower leaked will hopefully lead to some sort of government regulation on social media. Without regulation, social media will always prioritize profit.
- deleted 5y ago
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
The story that a woman at Facebook doesn't think they're going far enough to control speech they hate and bad-thoughts? I think Facebook is awful, but her primary complaint seemed to me that she lacked controls for what people like her, you know, the good people have access to prevent anyone else from seeing. That she was powerless to stop users from saying the wrong things. How was her motivation anything but a desire for more authoritarianism? She said she specifically took the job on the condition she could monitor and direct posts to prevent the wrong info from being online, that's the last type of person you want in that position, the one that wants it. I expect that we're still pretending Facebook is "just a private business", despite it being unlike any in history and that the ties to government are completely benign. I'm not saying she was wrong in any claim about internal discussions. But, if you can not imagine yourself being on the wrong side of someone like that, you have limited imagination.
- narrator 5y ago
  Facebook is surprisingly tolerant of controversial subjects. YouTube has gone scorched earth on millions of channels and deleted years of work of many people. Facebook was far more lenient and you could talk about non-official covid information for example where YouTube deleted anything that wasn't official narrative with extreme prejudice. Given how much bad stuff all over the world is happening to sacrifice freedom to get everyone to tow the official line on Covid that is complete science fiction level totalitarianism, I am sure Facebook made some very powerful and determined enemies with its more lenient stance. I was downvoted earlier for saying this was an intentional takedown and deleted my comment, but now I think this could be a full blown William Gibson Neuromancer Cyberpunk level corporate takedown attempt in progress!
- md2020 5y ago
  And of course this is flagged.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  She said she wanted FB to do something to stop misinformation and hate speech but what we've seen from Reddit is that "are mRNA vaccines actually safe?" becomes misinformation and "we shouldn't perform elective life-altering surgery on pre-teen children" becomes hate speech. There's not much I applaud Facebook for, but not listening to this woman is one of the few I do.
Ansil849 5y ago
> stopped its spread on FB networks. bingo. I don't care whether it's in the realm of tinfoil hat or not, this is the very real effect that this outage has had. By the time Facebook is back up, people on Facebook will be talking about the outage, not about the whistle blower report. Intentional or not, it will certainly be in Facebook's favor.
- hwers 5y ago
  Facebook controls the algorithm, wouldn't they just be able to down amplify how much that story is spread on it's network? (Rather than resort to this?)
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    Just to clarify...I pretty obviously don't think that Facebook intentionally pulled the plug to suppress a critical story. But the inadvertent effect of the downtime is nonetheless the fact that the critical story will not be the center of discussion on Facebook when Facebook is back up.
  - optimalsolver 5y ago
    A general outage is more deniable than dampening a negative story.
varispeed 5y ago
> would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally. Well, they work for Facebook. In my opinion you would have to have no morals to join that corporations in the first place, so I can imagine such ask would be just another dirty task to do. They seem to love it.
00deadbeef 5y ago
> The outage has pretty much buried that story It hasn't on the BBC. They're airing both stories.
pier25 5y ago
Here's the interview (which I had totally missed btw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI
yabatopia 5y ago
It’s like watching a hostage over-analysing why the abductor forgot to lock the door. Just get out en enjoy your newfound, albeit temporary, freedom.
nafix 5y ago
I was thinking more along the lines of the Pandora Papers hitting the MSM.
arrosenberg 5y ago
I love a good tinfoil hat theory, but in this case I doubt it. I have FB blocked on my network via pihole, but I don't explicitly block Instagram. Until sometime late last week (I noticed on Saturday), blocking facebook.com also blocked Instagram. As of this weekend, Instagram works just fine even with those blocks in place. I suspect Facebook was making some change to their DNS generally, and they made some kind of mistake in deployment that blew up this morning.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  I'll take the other side of that bet. Who messes with routing tables at noon on a Monday?
  - lwhi 5y ago
    Someone who doesn't want to deploy on a Friday?
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    I was thinking more of the ticking time-bomb variety, but that seems as good a time as any?
    - Yoric 5y ago
      Nah, a ticking time-bomb would "explode" on Christmas (or Aïd El Kebir, etc.), whenever most of the employees who could do something about it are absent.
      - arrosenberg 5y ago
        Still wasn't clear enough with my analogy! I was thinking more like a dam failure due to operator/designer error, not sabotage (but who knows). The damage is really small signs initially, followed by rolling catastrophic failures.
        Yoric 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zohch 5y ago
> The outage has pretty much buried that story, and perhaps more importantly, stopped its spread on FB networks. Buried the news ... which is basically as noteworthy the news that water is still wet. What exactly did she reveal that was not known before, or is it somehow newsworthy that Facebook also knew what everyone else knew? The real news ought to be how that managed to make it to the headlines.
smsm42 5y ago
As much as I'd love to imagine FB rage-quitting the internet because people don't seem to appreciate them enough, I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence. Probably has more to do with it being Monday (you don't put big stories on Friday and you sure don't deploy config changes on Friday!) than anything else.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I assume this outage is costing millions per hour. And it's not exactly great advertising for Facebook, either. I doubt very much they would do something like this on purpose.

ironlion624 5y ago
Unless “they” were one or two disgruntled employees with the access, know-how, and motive to execute a “mistake”. Emphasis added.
- bawolff 5y ago
  If it was intentional, that's serious jail time territory. That's a high price to pay for such limited downtime. I'm pretty sure an intentionally malicious actor with that type of access could do much worse things.
  - cheschire 5y ago
    I’m pretty sure the vast majority of entry level spy craft is about convincing people to do highly illegal and destructive things from a place of fear. Not saying this is the work of spies, just that it’s not unimaginable to think some middle manager could convince themselves or a subordinate to do something drastically illegal out of some fear that terrible things would happen otherwise.
  - xkeysc0re 5y ago
    I'm curious as to what law, exactly, they would be breaking. Sabotage in the US code is defined mostly in terms of war material and damages done to physical "national defense" properties. Certainly an employee would be fired and sued by the company, but is deliberately changing a routing policy (and not something like a worm or virus that deletes or otherwise degrades hardware and software) a crime?
    - bawolff 5y ago
      IANAL but I would assume computer fraud and abuse act: (5)(a)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
      - xkeysc0re 5y ago
        In the cases cited under the CFAA (such as https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12454527986200733388 https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=124545279862007...) it seems the employee deleted data and private info. In this case, no data was deleted or other computing property damaged it just became unreachable.
      - ironlion624 5y ago
        That’s the one.
      - pwdisswordfish0 5y ago
        The recent Van Buren decision would make that unlikely. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389500
    - ironlion624 5y ago
      Proof of intent is a significant burden placed upon prosecution. If that can be overcome, there’s legal precedent for criminal conviction namely under the CFAA. https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-computer/ https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-co...
optimalsolver 5y ago
Right, I know that, and I usually try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but man, Zuck doesn't make it easy. I'm just trying to process that FB is having its historic, all-networks global outage today of all days. And I bet FB would have paid double of whatever this will eventually cost them to make that story go away.
gfosco 5y ago
Dividing up last quarters $29B revenue leads to approximately $13.4M per hour of downtime, now past $53M after the 4 hour mark. But I haven't paid this much attention to Facebook in over a year.
- OJFord 5y ago
  That doesn't make a lot of sense though - Facebook generates revenue primarily from ad traffic (on all sorts of sites). It needs to be up for reputation and to harvest ever more detail for 'improving' those ads, sure, but not for revenue. (Modulo blip from ads on its own site.) So you can't just divide over time like that.
  - fasteddie 5y ago
    What? It absolutely needs to be up -- those ads being served are on Facebook and Insta, not display banners on random sites.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      That's what I meant by 'ads on its own site' - but I was under the impression that Facebook generated most revenue from selling data/ads for display elsewhere (as well as on Facebook.com itself, and other subsidiaries). Perhaps I was wrong about that? Quick search shows up 'audience network', but I'm not sure to what extent that's what I was thinking of.
      - bryan_w 5y ago
        Nope, for the most part all the ads that Facebook serves are for facebook owned sites and properties. They don't sell data, or have general ad placements on 3rd party websites.
      - aerosmile 5y ago
        wow...
  - _hl_ 5y ago

kickopotomus 5y ago

Counterpoint: I had not even heard about the whistle-blower until seeing stories about the outage. One of the largest web services in the world being out of commission for multiple hours is a big deal in 2021. It's a top story on most news sites and other social media (e.g. here at HN, reddit, twitter). If you want something to pass under the radar, it's probably best to not attract global attention.

bool3max 5y ago

> That said, I can't see how FB managers and engineers would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally. They can either agree to comply with the orders from up above or they face consequences? How is that hard to comprehend?

nonsince 5y ago

Ah yes, the best way to bury a moral scandal of the kind that usually gets forgotten in a week is to undermine the trust of almost every single user worldwide. This is a very good conspiracy.

notyourwork 5y ago

That news broke ~12 hours ago right?

neom 5y ago

If I was so inclined to put on my conspiracy theorist robe, I’d guess more likely related to the bulk of Pandora Papers news hitting today.

newbamboo 5y ago
Or evergrande.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The outage has pretty much buried that story, Strongly disagree. The outage has millions of people entering "Facebook" into their search engines. Most engines will conveniently put related news at the top of the search results page. The most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower. Plus everyone has a lot of spare time to read the article now that Facebook and Instagram are down. The outage didn't bury the story. It amplified it. Any suggestions that Facebook did this on purpose don't even make sense.

nwiswell 5y ago
> recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower With respect I am pretty sure that the most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is this one. Holistically I agree that this isn't the kind of distraction Facebook wants, although it tickles me to imagine Mark in the datacenter going Rambo with a pair of wire cutters.
- timdaub 5y ago
  Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.
- timdaub 5y ago
  Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-facebook-instagram-whatsapp/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  That is in no way gonna make people forget the whistleblower story - if anything, it's gonna increase the antipathy to having a single point of failure. Face it, everyone hates FB, even the people who spend the most time on it.

tdrdt 5y ago

Did the whistleblower reveal something we didn't know already? To me this seems like a million dollar mistake.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Did the whistleblower reveal something we didn't know already? A lot. The resulting Wall Street Journal series directly led to the shut down of Instagram for Kids.
Levitz 5y ago
I see it as similar to Snowden, in the sense that everybody kind of knew (actually guessed) but now we actually know. It doesn't come as a shock, but it's important information to have since it can be now argued with authority.
giantrobot 5y ago
The whistleblower revealed that Facebook knows it is bad for society. The documents also show Facebook actively optimizes its algorithms for "bad for society" content because that drives engagement which makes them more money. Furthermore Facebook doesn't do as much content moderation in regions/languages with low usage numbers because it costs more than those users make them. So calls for genocide in Myanmar basically go unchallenged and unmoderated because Facebook doesn't make much money in Myanmar. Sorry genocided minority, you should have been more valuable to Facebook.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes Could a pang of morality have struck one of the employees with the keys to the kingdom?

_yo2u 5y ago

I actually think most importantly it shows everyone what the world without FB is like ;)

irobeth 5y ago

FWIW, every article I've read has referenced the interview, and I personally find it hard to believe Facebook would be unaware of the Streisand Effect

joncrane 5y ago

I had no idea about the 60 Minutes thing until people started mentioning it in response to this outage.

carbonx 5y ago
Agree. I just did a quick check and 60 Minutes averages around 10 million viewers. It's not like in 1977 when something 20%+ of the US population was watching that show.
- savoytruffle 5y ago
  It is pretty well available — and quickly — via piracy means, which I have always thought interesting for its somewhat esoteric content.
this_user 5y ago
Most people outside of the US don't even know what "60 Minutes" is. Even fewer have heard about that report. And even fewer care. But everyone has now heard about the outage. This would be the worst possible way of trying to stop the spread of the story. The more likely scenario is that this was the final straw for some disgruntled employee who decided to pull the plug on the entire thing.
- indianpianist 5y ago
  > Most people outside of the US don't even know what "60 Minutes" is. I live in Australia. 60 Minutes exists here as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_program) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_prog...
  - hansel_der 5y ago
    arguing on the the basis of a strong cultural differentiation between the us and aus might not work as well as you think.

at-fates-hands 5y ago

It also looks like its much deeper than just people not finding the site. Employees are all locked out and there's another story on the front page on HN saying employees are locked out of the building as well. If you wanted to scrub a lot of the data and nefarious evidence the whistle blower brought out, this would be a great way to do it, under the guise of a simple "employee screw up" cover story. Its hard for me to think something more nefarious is afoot considering FB's track record with a myriad of other things. At this point, it seems more likely something sketchy is going on and not just some random employee who screwed up and brought down the entire network with a simple change. I would assume there are several layers of decision makers who oversee the BGP records. I have a hard time thinking one person had sole access to these and brought everything down with an innocent change. FB has too many smart people who would allow a single point of failure for their entire network such that if it goes down, it becomes "a simple error on the part of some random employee". This is not some junior dev who broke the build, its far more serious than that.

InitialLastName 5y ago

Not just that, but another story just broke about the sale of personal info on 1.5 billion FB users. Maybe this is just to cover the fact that they leaked information about 20% of the earth's population?

wallawe 5y ago
> they leaked information about 20% of the earth's population This is straight up false. It was scrapers extracting data from public profiles. They already incorporate anti-scraping techniques, so there's not much they can do other than require every one to set their profile to private.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  If you don't collect the data in one place, there's no chance of leaking it. If they want to position themselves as the global phonebook, that's fine, but they should be open about that. Edit to add: If you aren't in the "gather and sell access to everybody's data" business, "private" is a sensible default setting for that information. On the other hand, if you're Facebook...
  - JCharante 5y ago
    It's kinda in the name isn't it? Phonebook... Facebook...
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variant 5y ago

Hanlon's razor applies here, but it's a lot less fun. :)

nkozyra 5y ago

> I know this is tinhat territory, but it's weird this happens right after the FB whistleblower interview on 60 minutes. It's not like this is a new thing. We've been getting [facebook does awful thing] news stories pretty consistently for years now.

thepasswordis 5y ago

If we're in "tinhat" territory: it seems extremely odd to me that this whistelblower seems to be "blowing the whistle" on the fact that facebook isn't doing enough to control what people are thinking and talking about. Like...what? "Brave whistelblower comes out showing that facebook isn't doing enough to control what you are thinking!" is sortof arguing past the question. Should facecbook be in charge of deciding what you think?

DeRock 5y ago
> this whistelblower seems to be "blowing the whistle" on the fact that facebook isn't doing enough to control what people are thinking and talking about. That is not at all what the whistleblower is alleging. Facebook already controls what content you are seeing through its news feed algorithm. The parameters to that algorithm are not a 1-dimensional "how much control", but instead uses engagement metrics for what content to show. The whistleblower claims that the engagement optimization, according to facebooks own research, prioritizes emotionally angry/hurtful/divisive content.
- serial_dev 5y ago
  I didn't have the time to watch the interview yet but... wasn't it common knowledge for years? Is there anything else in the interview the whistleblower alleges, or can prove?
  - windowsrookie 5y ago
    We all knew Facebook is bad for society. The whistleblower showed us that Facebook has done internal studies and that these studies have shown their products are bad for society/contributed to the insurrection/promote human trafficking/damage teen mental health/etc. But even with these studies, Facebook has decided to prioritize growth and revenue, rather than fix the issues that are bad for society. What this whistleblower leaked will hopefully lead to some sort of government regulation on social media. Without regulation, social media will always prioritize profit.
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SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

The story that a woman at Facebook doesn't think they're going far enough to control speech they hate and bad-thoughts? I think Facebook is awful, but her primary complaint seemed to me that she lacked controls for what people like her, you know, the good people have access to prevent anyone else from seeing. That she was powerless to stop users from saying the wrong things. How was her motivation anything but a desire for more authoritarianism? She said she specifically took the job on the condition she could monitor and direct posts to prevent the wrong info from being online, that's the last type of person you want in that position, the one that wants it. I expect that we're still pretending Facebook is "just a private business", despite it being unlike any in history and that the ties to government are completely benign. I'm not saying she was wrong in any claim about internal discussions. But, if you can not imagine yourself being on the wrong side of someone like that, you have limited imagination.

narrator 5y ago
Facebook is surprisingly tolerant of controversial subjects. YouTube has gone scorched earth on millions of channels and deleted years of work of many people. Facebook was far more lenient and you could talk about non-official covid information for example where YouTube deleted anything that wasn't official narrative with extreme prejudice. Given how much bad stuff all over the world is happening to sacrifice freedom to get everyone to tow the official line on Covid that is complete science fiction level totalitarianism, I am sure Facebook made some very powerful and determined enemies with its more lenient stance. I was downvoted earlier for saying this was an intentional takedown and deleted my comment, but now I think this could be a full blown William Gibson Neuromancer Cyberpunk level corporate takedown attempt in progress!
md2020 5y ago
And of course this is flagged.
commandlinefan 5y ago
She said she wanted FB to do something to stop misinformation and hate speech but what we've seen from Reddit is that "are mRNA vaccines actually safe?" becomes misinformation and "we shouldn't perform elective life-altering surgery on pre-teen children" becomes hate speech. There's not much I applaud Facebook for, but not listening to this woman is one of the few I do.

Ansil849 5y ago

> stopped its spread on FB networks. bingo. I don't care whether it's in the realm of tinfoil hat or not, this is the very real effect that this outage has had. By the time Facebook is back up, people on Facebook will be talking about the outage, not about the whistle blower report. Intentional or not, it will certainly be in Facebook's favor.

hwers 5y ago
Facebook controls the algorithm, wouldn't they just be able to down amplify how much that story is spread on it's network? (Rather than resort to this?)
- Ansil849 5y ago
  Just to clarify...I pretty obviously don't think that Facebook intentionally pulled the plug to suppress a critical story. But the inadvertent effect of the downtime is nonetheless the fact that the critical story will not be the center of discussion on Facebook when Facebook is back up.
- optimalsolver 5y ago
  A general outage is more deniable than dampening a negative story.

varispeed 5y ago

> would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally. Well, they work for Facebook. In my opinion you would have to have no morals to join that corporations in the first place, so I can imagine such ask would be just another dirty task to do. They seem to love it.

00deadbeef 5y ago

> The outage has pretty much buried that story It hasn't on the BBC. They're airing both stories.

pier25 5y ago

Here's the interview (which I had totally missed btw) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI

yabatopia 5y ago

It’s like watching a hostage over-analysing why the abductor forgot to lock the door. Just get out en enjoy your newfound, albeit temporary, freedom.

nafix 5y ago

I was thinking more along the lines of the Pandora Papers hitting the MSM.

arrosenberg 5y ago

I love a good tinfoil hat theory, but in this case I doubt it. I have FB blocked on my network via pihole, but I don't explicitly block Instagram. Until sometime late last week (I noticed on Saturday), blocking facebook.com also blocked Instagram. As of this weekend, Instagram works just fine even with those blocks in place. I suspect Facebook was making some change to their DNS generally, and they made some kind of mistake in deployment that blew up this morning.

joezydeco 5y ago
I'll take the other side of that bet. Who messes with routing tables at noon on a Monday?
- lwhi 5y ago
  Someone who doesn't want to deploy on a Friday?
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  I was thinking more of the ticking time-bomb variety, but that seems as good a time as any?
  - Yoric 5y ago
    Nah, a ticking time-bomb would "explode" on Christmas (or Aïd El Kebir, etc.), whenever most of the employees who could do something about it are absent.
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      Still wasn't clear enough with my analogy! I was thinking more like a dam failure due to operator/designer error, not sabotage (but who knows). The damage is really small signs initially, followed by rolling catastrophic failures.
      - Yoric 5y ago

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zohch 5y ago

> The outage has pretty much buried that story, and perhaps more importantly, stopped its spread on FB networks. Buried the news ... which is basically as noteworthy the news that water is still wet. What exactly did she reveal that was not known before, or is it somehow newsworthy that Facebook also knew what everyone else knew? The real news ought to be how that managed to make it to the headlines.

smsm42 5y ago

As much as I'd love to imagine FB rage-quitting the internet because people don't seem to appreciate them enough, I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence. Probably has more to do with it being Monday (you don't put big stories on Friday and you sure don't deploy config changes on Friday!) than anything else.