2 ms·

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is down!" threads here on HN, including a 1200+ comment thread about it. You can say "well, that was just morbid curiosity..." but then I'd ask for a pointer to another equally urgent response to an event. Any event. If all the smart kids find Facebook boring and not-at-all addictive then why did it suck up all the oxygen on the internet when it disappeared for a couple hours?

speedybird 5y ago
A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.
InitialLastName 5y ago
There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over"). It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built. Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.

2 ms·

People talk about how boring Facebook is, but two days ago, when it went down for a few hours, it was all anybody talked about. There were multiple "Facebook is

by karaterobot 5y ago

speedybird 5y ago
A FAANG going down for hours is interesting even to people who don't associate with that company. You're trying to frame this as a contradiction, but it isn't.
InitialLastName 5y ago
There's a difference between Facebook, Inc (the company whose services were down) and facebook.com (the website that this article is about, which people are saying is "over"). It wasn't just Facebook (the social media website) that was down, though; it was Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down (if you're keeping score, that's 3-4 of the top 10 apps for both iOS and Android, depending on how you count Messenger), a large number of services that (surprisingly to many people) turned out to depend on Facebook's services, and a general firestorm of DNS DDOS's from services trying to access Facebook.com. That turns into a large portion of the internet behaving badly, not even counting that Whatsapp is the commons on which much of the non-US world's communications are built. Besides all that, it's unusual for such a globally major website to be down at all, much less for hours. From a reliability perspective, that ~6 hours that Facebook's systems were down sets them an upper limit of 99.93% availability for the year.