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Banking and the ability to use Facebook messenger are not even remotely close to the same thing. SMS services are still alive, so are phone and other actually c

Banking and the ability to use Facebook messenger are not even remotely close to the same thing. SMS services are still alive, so are phone and other actually critical services. Messenger is nice, but really, outside of being able to send stickers and whatnot (which is nice) this isn't critical infrastructure.

manquer 5y ago
Not in the U.S. Perhaps, However many services even government ones depends on WhatsApp business accounts to provide essential services. A ton of apps also use fb login as their only or primary authentication mechanism some of them would definitely be essential services. Maybe building on Facebook was not best idea for these apps , but essential services would have been impacted nonetheless.
- trutannus 5y ago
  > Not in the U.S. Perhaps Why the assumption that I'm American?
  - manquer 5y ago
    It was not specific to you. Messenger is a bit more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S. compared to rest of the world where WhatsApp is sometimes defacto replacement for SMS (phone number vs Facebook account I guess). I have seen WhatsApp or telegram logos on billboards or printed media as support channels but never really messenger anywhere. I have not seen WhatsApp in the U.S. commonly as a support channel yet . Since you mentioned messenger I qualified U.S. out as perhaps a different market
    - trutannus 5y ago
      I see what you're saying. I still don't think there's a case to be made here for letting the government control these services to ensure uptime. The argument instead should be stop using Facebook properties for business, that's not what they're for. The argument is essentially that these organizations have gotten so successful that they need to hand control over their infrastructure to the state, since the state will manage it better. You might not be making this argument, but some in this thread clearly are when they ask "how can this be allowed to happen". I can't think of a single system managed by the government which actually is run in a way that's as good as Facebook's networks. Consider it this way: Facebook has crashed less in the past 10 years than the stock market. That should give people thinking of state control for reliability something to think about.
      - manquer 5y ago
        Stock Market is hardly the right comparison Comparable would be messaging on traditional networks. OTP/Erlang based AXD301 has had exceptionally high uptime, the reliability figures commonly cited are 9 Nines! (99.9999999%)[1] for example. The entire language stack was built primarily for telecom to have exceptional reliability and uptime. WhatsApp (at-least originally) was built on Erlang and BEAM VM. Telecom systems have likely had lesser downtime than Facebook in the last 30 years. [1] Uptime for AXD301 over 20 years has many other factors including hardware, architecture etc and the 9 nines is really the reliability of Erlang when there was uptime , the caveat being reliability numbers cited and uptime are not directly related .
        trutannus 5y ago
        The stock market is a fine comparison. It's something that's run by, or at least heavily controlled and regulated by the federal government of many nations. Telecom services run on the telecom company's infrastructure. The government just happens to pay for them to build it where I live. The purpose of the analogy is to highlight how the state is pretty bad at managing things, even when it pours billions of dollars into doing so. > Telecom systems have likely had lesser downtime than Facebook in the last 30 years I've had a handful outages in the past few years for my telecom services. Rogers' network failed in Canada in 2020 for a full day, crippling communications across the country. I've had one outage with Facebook since 2008. At worst, they're just as reliable. Regardless, the argument here really is "should the state step in and take control of Facebook's uptime because a lot of people chose to use it and it goes offline for a few hours a decade"?. I still maintain that none of this is an affirmative argument.

manquer 5y ago

Not in the U.S. Perhaps, However many services even government ones depends on WhatsApp business accounts to provide essential services. A ton of apps also use fb login as their only or primary authentication mechanism some of them would definitely be essential services. Maybe building on Facebook was not best idea for these apps , but essential services would have been impacted nonetheless.

trutannus 5y ago
> Not in the U.S. Perhaps Why the assumption that I'm American?
- manquer 5y ago
  It was not specific to you. Messenger is a bit more popular than WhatsApp in the U.S. compared to rest of the world where WhatsApp is sometimes defacto replacement for SMS (phone number vs Facebook account I guess). I have seen WhatsApp or telegram logos on billboards or printed media as support channels but never really messenger anywhere. I have not seen WhatsApp in the U.S. commonly as a support channel yet . Since you mentioned messenger I qualified U.S. out as perhaps a different market
  - trutannus 5y ago
    I see what you're saying. I still don't think there's a case to be made here for letting the government control these services to ensure uptime. The argument instead should be stop using Facebook properties for business, that's not what they're for. The argument is essentially that these organizations have gotten so successful that they need to hand control over their infrastructure to the state, since the state will manage it better. You might not be making this argument, but some in this thread clearly are when they ask "how can this be allowed to happen". I can't think of a single system managed by the government which actually is run in a way that's as good as Facebook's networks. Consider it this way: Facebook has crashed less in the past 10 years than the stock market. That should give people thinking of state control for reliability something to think about.
    - manquer 5y ago
      Stock Market is hardly the right comparison Comparable would be messaging on traditional networks. OTP/Erlang based AXD301 has had exceptionally high uptime, the reliability figures commonly cited are 9 Nines! (99.9999999%)[1] for example. The entire language stack was built primarily for telecom to have exceptional reliability and uptime. WhatsApp (at-least originally) was built on Erlang and BEAM VM. Telecom systems have likely had lesser downtime than Facebook in the last 30 years. [1] Uptime for AXD301 over 20 years has many other factors including hardware, architecture etc and the 9 nines is really the reliability of Erlang when there was uptime , the caveat being reliability numbers cited and uptime are not directly related .
      - trutannus 5y ago
        The stock market is a fine comparison. It's something that's run by, or at least heavily controlled and regulated by the federal government of many nations. Telecom services run on the telecom company's infrastructure. The government just happens to pay for them to build it where I live. The purpose of the analogy is to highlight how the state is pretty bad at managing things, even when it pours billions of dollars into doing so. > Telecom systems have likely had lesser downtime than Facebook in the last 30 years I've had a handful outages in the past few years for my telecom services. Rogers' network failed in Canada in 2020 for a full day, crippling communications across the country. I've had one outage with Facebook since 2008. At worst, they're just as reliable. Regardless, the argument here really is "should the state step in and take control of Facebook's uptime because a lot of people chose to use it and it goes offline for a few hours a decade"?. I still maintain that none of this is an affirmative argument.