5 ms·

The mobile whatsapp app should notify that the whatsapp servers are down and not allow you to just send messages that won't arrive for six hours

herald67 5y ago
yup, they should. I couldn't send the messages as well and thought my mobile had some issues and tried rebooting it
dTal 5y ago
The app is designed under the assumption that Facebook servers are never down. If you can't reach the servers, the problem is assumed to be client-side, in which case they have decided the best UI is to keep retrying (not unreasonably in a mobile context). The only way to disambiguate "no internet service" (extremely common) with "Facebook dropped off the internet" (black-swan rare) is to ping some other, third party service. Unless that third party service has infrastructure as good as Facebook's, it will drown in pings the moment Facebook genuinely goes offline. I can see why Facebook wouldn't want to open that can of worms, if they even envisaged this failure mode (unlikely considering the chaos it caused).
- stormdennis 5y ago
  Good points. Then it should just tell the user that they appear to have no internet service.
- EricE 5y ago
  >The app is designed under the assumption that Facebook servers are never down. Which was and is a lame assumption. Stuff happens. SMTP wouldn't even be phased by this; it would just pick up where it left off. I've seen far too many applications fail in bizzare ways because people make unrealistic assumptions like "X will ALWAYS be there". Sure it's highly unlikely, but when you have multiple things making the same dumb assumptions, on the inevitable day when multiple things that need X and X is suddenly no longer there then you start to get cascading effects of Y that relied on something that relied on X not being there when it is assumed that it would always be there so now Y fails, and then something dependent in the same way on Y unexpectedly fails and so on. One should never assume that anything will "always" be available. That's an incredibly unrealistic assumption; and the more interconnected things become, the chances of these really nasty dependency chains/cascade failures skyrocket - leading to far worse outages and longer recovery times.
  - dTal 5y ago
    How would you address the issue?

herald67 5y ago

yup, they should. I couldn't send the messages as well and thought my mobile had some issues and tried rebooting it

dTal 5y ago

The app is designed under the assumption that Facebook servers are never down. If you can't reach the servers, the problem is assumed to be client-side, in which case they have decided the best UI is to keep retrying (not unreasonably in a mobile context). The only way to disambiguate "no internet service" (extremely common) with "Facebook dropped off the internet" (black-swan rare) is to ping some other, third party service. Unless that third party service has infrastructure as good as Facebook's, it will drown in pings the moment Facebook genuinely goes offline. I can see why Facebook wouldn't want to open that can of worms, if they even envisaged this failure mode (unlikely considering the chaos it caused).

stormdennis 5y ago
Good points. Then it should just tell the user that they appear to have no internet service.
EricE 5y ago
>The app is designed under the assumption that Facebook servers are never down. Which was and is a lame assumption. Stuff happens. SMTP wouldn't even be phased by this; it would just pick up where it left off. I've seen far too many applications fail in bizzare ways because people make unrealistic assumptions like "X will ALWAYS be there". Sure it's highly unlikely, but when you have multiple things making the same dumb assumptions, on the inevitable day when multiple things that need X and X is suddenly no longer there then you start to get cascading effects of Y that relied on something that relied on X not being there when it is assumed that it would always be there so now Y fails, and then something dependent in the same way on Y unexpectedly fails and so on. One should never assume that anything will "always" be available. That's an incredibly unrealistic assumption; and the more interconnected things become, the chances of these really nasty dependency chains/cascade failures skyrocket - leading to far worse outages and longer recovery times.
- dTal 5y ago
  How would you address the issue?