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Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp Outage

399 points| iag | 5 years ago |developers.facebook.com | reply

238 comments

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[+] ForTheWin98|5 years ago|reply
"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

With Facebook products, you see outages in December and May. Why? Those are the last few weeks to complete your project before your performance review. Miss this window and you find yourself in career trouble. Facebook employees put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves during these months.

I would not be surprised if this outage was caused by a bad pull request related to a new project.

[+] rachelbythebay|5 years ago|reply
Thanksgiving and Christmas are then some of the quietest times in terms of outages. Of course, the interval right after then is usually worse, since all of the backlogged changes from the holidays land at once.

“Diff”, not PR.

[+] hyeomans|5 years ago|reply
do people get fired or not promoted?
[+] florianmari|5 years ago|reply
It's not only Facebook, a lot of services, Deezer, some operators in France... https://downdetector.fr/
[+] avh02|5 years ago|reply
i'm not necessarily familiar with all the services (or the specific dependencies) on that list, but a lot of it will be a knock on effect from e.g: fb login not working as expected

People will very often see it as "service x with fb login is broken"

[+] echlebek|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, I recently discovered while evaluating Deezer that it doesn't function without scripts from facebook. So, I didn't subscribe.
[+] mmccaff|5 years ago|reply
This red "major outage" status has been reported on their dashboard since at least Dec 2, when an (unrelated to messenger) api bug was introduced that I've been waiting on a fix for.

It has been surprisingly slow to get a fix or an update.

[+] vitus|5 years ago|reply
Depending on the company, "major" can be used to mean a number of things, such as visible and painful customer impact, or significant revenue impact.

Based on the description of the outage (issues serving new ads to Messenger), it reads like the latter.

> We are currently investigating an issue where creating new ads with app_destination as MESSENGER results in the following error ...

Admittedly if it does have significant revenue impact, I'm surprised that change hasn't been rolled back or otherwise mitigated in the week+ that the incident's been open. Or maybe it has, and nobody remembered to close the incident.

[+] ourcat|5 years ago|reply
It looks like they've had issues for a while now. 'December 2nd' ? " Invalid Page Welcome Message for Messenger Destination Ads"

- The thought of 'ads' in a private messaging app repulses me. I don't use any of these three apps. Mostly since they all require you hand over your mobile phone number. Which then becomes a very powerful 'foreign key'/unique identifier to so many other third or fourth-party marketing databases which might also have it.

[+] l1ghthouse|5 years ago|reply
That explains all the new Telegram contacts :P
[+] m-p-3|5 years ago|reply
It makes me sad those aren't new Signal users :(
[+] speeder|5 years ago|reply
Wanted to see the probably interesting heatmap in downdetector but... downdetector is down :(
[+] marcodave|5 years ago|reply
we need a downdetector detector !
[+] mkl95|5 years ago|reply
Whatsapp is extremely dominant in my country, but I keep encouraging friends and acquaintances to install Telegram. As far as I know, there won't be anything preventing FB from geoblocking European users when the company eventually gets in some serious trouble, like it just did in the US.
[+] jbverschoor|5 years ago|reply
Why telegram and not signal?
[+] flak48|5 years ago|reply
When did FB geoblock users in the US?
[+] jokoon|5 years ago|reply
isn't signal better?
[+] cecilpl|5 years ago|reply
The subject of the antitrust suits filed against Facebook came up in a Facebook comment thread for me yesterday.

Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.

[+] hnlmorg|5 years ago|reply
Standard Oil was broken up over 100 years ago and Bell System took 70 years of antitrust complaints (the last case ran through courts for over a decade!) and even then Bell eventually caved and broke themselves up.

Never say never and all that...but it's not like past precedence has shown us the courts are trigger happy when it comes to breaking up monopolies.

[+] turdnagel|5 years ago|reply
As of 12:31 PM eastern on December 10, the status page does show "Major Outage," but it had been showing that related to a totally separate Messenger issue since the 2nd.
[+] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
Quick, build a competitor
[+] Hamuko|5 years ago|reply
Good idea. We can also see which happens first: Facebook fixing its outage, or Facebook buying up that competitor.
[+] arendtio|5 years ago|reply
My self-hosted XMPP-Server seems to work without problems ;-)
[+] acvny|5 years ago|reply
There are hundreds of facebook alternatives websites already and dozens of Instagram and Messenger and WhatsApp. I guess tiktok will literally replace Instagram very soon (not because of this outage, but it will help).
[+] clon|5 years ago|reply
MS Teams is down for us as well. Possibly a spike related to people looking for a backup.
[+] spzb|5 years ago|reply
That history graph’s not looking too healthy for the past couple of months.
[+] _carbyau_|5 years ago|reply
Curious, do these outages affect Oculus users too?

I am so looking at VR in the near future but crap like this rules certain products right out.

[+] hsuduebc|5 years ago|reply
Did they publish any info about these incidents? It would be interesting to see where these robust systems fail and how.
[+] WaitWaitWha|5 years ago|reply
> OH, thank God! - William Preston as Depth Gauge in Waterworld (1995)