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How does the author come to the conclusion to break Facebook down and regulate it after the outage ? There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies

How does the author come to the conclusion to break Facebook down and regulate it after the outage ? There are a lot of power outages in the world by companies that are regulated, sometimes even state-owned.

dilyevsky 5y ago
Maybe the intent is to have it down more often? I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…
- Jugurtha 5y ago
  >Maybe the intent is to have it down more often? It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent. >I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks… I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.
mrpopo 5y ago
I think the point of breaking down Facebook into smaller entities is to reduce centralization of operations, and thus the impact of single-point failures. The same conclusion should be made of a giant state-owned company.
- whitepaint 5y ago
  What about Cloudflare? Should it be illegal?
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    Cloudflare and Whatsapp are not comparable. The relationships are different (CF provides hosting for individual businesses or services, Whatsapp facilitates person-to-person communication), the switching costs are different (most or all CF customers can on a reasonable time delay switch to a different provider with 0 downtime, while 'switching' away from whatsapp requires moving your entire social graph to a new app), and the impact of an outage is different (some or all CF-based services are degraded/down vs you can't communicate with anyone from your social graph unless you can reach them on the phone or in person) Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way. There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.
    - whitepaint 5y ago
      Fair enough. > Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way. I agree with this. However, I completely disagree that we should "break down and regulate Facebook". We already have gazillion alternatives. And it's up to governments and people themselves to use them. This accident is a great reminder that people should have an alternative.
franklampard 5y ago
Dumbness
TheHypnotist 5y ago
My guess is, using your analogy, how often do you see a power outage in New York causing an outage in Nebraska? Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.
- Jugurtha 5y ago
  The premise of this question is that we know how often a power outage in Nebraska was caused by a power outage in New York. We don't know, and the conclusion should not be that it is not that often, but that we do not know. If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
- etblg 5y ago
  Well the 2003 Northeast blackout was started by a power utility in Ohio, and took out most of the north-east USA and even Ontario -- making it an international outage. The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun). There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina. Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.

dilyevsky 5y ago

Maybe the intent is to have it down more often? I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks…

Jugurtha 5y ago
>Maybe the intent is to have it down more often? It would have been a well put snarky tweet if that were the intent. >I think you’re assuming these empty moralizing statements aren’t just made for the clicks… I am guilty of not immediately considering people who write these things as attention seeking virtue signaling consensus wanting idiots; I may as well be the idiot failing to understand what they're saying.

mrpopo 5y ago

I think the point of breaking down Facebook into smaller entities is to reduce centralization of operations, and thus the impact of single-point failures. The same conclusion should be made of a giant state-owned company.

whitepaint 5y ago
What about Cloudflare? Should it be illegal?
- kevingadd 5y ago
  Cloudflare and Whatsapp are not comparable. The relationships are different (CF provides hosting for individual businesses or services, Whatsapp facilitates person-to-person communication), the switching costs are different (most or all CF customers can on a reasonable time delay switch to a different provider with 0 downtime, while 'switching' away from whatsapp requires moving your entire social graph to a new app), and the impact of an outage is different (some or all CF-based services are degraded/down vs you can't communicate with anyone from your social graph unless you can reach them on the phone or in person) Or for a basic summary: Cloudflare is interoperable, and the damage done by a CF outage may be widespread but it's limited to CF customers. Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way. There are probably other ways you could combat this instead of just breaking up FB - for example some telcos give special deals to Facebook and Whatsapp so they're cheaper than competitors, and they're already often cheaper than SMS. You could fix that. But centralization can be fought directly on US soil by breaking the company up, while fixing those issues I mentioned has to be done legally on a country by country basis.
  - whitepaint 5y ago
    Fair enough. > Whatsapp isn't interoperable and an outage effectively shuts off wireless/internet communications for a sizable chunk of the earth's population. It certainly shouldn't be that way. I agree with this. However, I completely disagree that we should "break down and regulate Facebook". We already have gazillion alternatives. And it's up to governments and people themselves to use them. This accident is a great reminder that people should have an alternative.

franklampard 5y ago

Dumbness

TheHypnotist 5y ago

My guess is, using your analogy, how often do you see a power outage in New York causing an outage in Nebraska? Although, given the tech landscape today, that's not a great 1:1 example anyway.

Jugurtha 5y ago
The premise of this question is that we know how often a power outage in Nebraska was caused by a power outage in New York. We don't know, and the conclusion should not be that it is not that often, but that we do not know. If anything is vulnerable to cascading, domino, effects, it is electric grids: interconnected networks, even at an intercontinental level.
etblg 5y ago
Well the 2003 Northeast blackout was started by a power utility in Ohio, and took out most of the north-east USA and even Ontario -- making it an international outage. The 2011 Southwest blackout was caused by a substation in Arizona, and took down power in large parts of California and Tijuana (another international one, fun). There was apparently one in 2019 in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay that was started by a transmission line in Argentina. Not super common, but more common than you'd think, power grids are very interconnected and weird.