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WhatsApp Down in Some Regions

125 points| tomklein | 5 years ago |xn--allestrungen-9ib.de | reply

105 comments

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[+] zarq|5 years ago|reply
The site presents me with a pop-up:

> When you proceed to access our site, the companies listed in the Cookie Consent Tool will use cookies and other technologies. This is further explained in our Cookie Notice.

None of those are links, and the only button is "Agree and access site". How do I find the Cookie Consent Tool and the Cookie Notice, without having to click "Agree"?

[+] ncallaway|5 years ago|reply
I personally inspected the page to delete the popup from the DOM without clicking "agree".

I found their privacy page here: https://xn--allestrungen-9ib.de/privacy.html.

Interestingly, that has a link to a cookie policy that links to speedtest.net's cookie policy (https://www.speedtest.net/de/about/cookie-policy). I think downdetector is offered by Ookla, so that probably is their cookie policy?

speedtest.net's cookie policy leaves something to be desired. In the english translation it has:

> If you prefer that we do not collect information that will help us determine which advertisements we are best serving you, click this icon.

But I don't see an icon there, or anything clickable. In case it's a mistranslation here's the original german:

> Wenn Sie es vorziehen, dass wir keine Informationen erfassen, mit deren Hilfe wir ermitteln können, welche Werbung wir Ihnen am besten anzeigen, klicken Sie auf dieses Symbol.

Based on that, I have no idea how you can manage your cookie preferences to express a desire not to be tracked.

It seems to be an absolutely flagrant violation of GDPR, and I would encourage a German citizen to bring a case to the German data protection authorities.

[+] qwertox|5 years ago|reply
> and other technologies

Do they need to specify these other technologies, which they are and how they are being used?

[+] MauranKilom|5 years ago|reply
I get the same here in Germany (if I turn off uBlock Origin). It's not GDPR complaint, plain and simple.
[+] Karawebnetwork|5 years ago|reply
Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger are all down for me.
[+] qwertox|5 years ago|reply
Sounds like paradise.
[+] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
Let's not get overexcited ... they will probably come back up again.
[+] adrianb|5 years ago|reply
Downdetector [1] shows some problems with other websites including Twitter and Microsoft as well. Doesn't seem like a cloud provider being down though.

[1] https://downdetector.com/

[+] cratermoon|5 years ago|reply
Oh wow, I don't think I've seen a real IDNA/Punycode domain in the wild before.
[+] sneak|5 years ago|reply
You probably have and didn't realize it.
[+] sodality2|5 years ago|reply
Slowly instagram is coming back? seems like progress is being made

edit: push notifs came through. inbox not loading however

edit 2: seems to be fully restored. all my homies are responding to messages

[+] marcodiego|5 years ago|reply
Down in Brazil too together with instagram and facebook. More food for conspiracy theorists...
[+] Daishiman|5 years ago|reply
You mean all products owned by the same company, most likely hosted in the same data centers and with the same infra?
[+] tcarn|5 years ago|reply
Phew, it's not just me. Beyond me why more of these big tech companies can't build more redundancies for their services.
[+] cranekam|5 years ago|reply
These companies build for redundancy. Not in the sense of "we need 10 servers, let's have 10 more for redundancy" (that gets expensive when you have millions of hosts) but by scaling out across multiple regions/DCs/clusters/etc such that there is enough slack in the system to absorb failure of 1 or 2 resource units (DCs, fiber, whatever).

Also, widespread outages like this are seldom the result of insufficient capacity. They are almost always a perfect storm of several failures within systems that are individually build to handle adverse conditions. An example might be a bug within a task scheduling system that inadvertently scales down some critical service which in turn leads to something else failing to reach consensus or read configuration or who knows what. The point is that each of these components is designed and built to handle failure but something the holes in the cheese line up and the whole thing fails.

In this case since IG, WA and FB were affected it's reasonable to guess the failure was in some shared component like load balancing or task placement, though (as hinted at above) the origin of the fault is not necessarily in that component directly.

[+] sodality2|5 years ago|reply
The scale of facebook is beyond what you probably imagine it to be.
[+] justapassenger|5 years ago|reply
It's not just about adding redundancies. Redundancies don't protect you against bugs, and they're itself very complex, so they introduce more opportunity for errors. Even with best redundancy, you'll have incidents from time to time.
[+] iKevinShah|5 years ago|reply
And they are back up (at least for me, India). I hope it was not a push on Friday evening or worse "after EoD".
[+] toyg|5 years ago|reply
Probably a push on Friday morning on the US West Coast...
[+] francis-io|5 years ago|reply
Down for me in the UK for the past 30 mins.
[+] luxpir|5 years ago|reply
Same. Quick, SMS everyone a Signal link!
[+] justin4all|5 years ago|reply
Decentralized services like Matrix - anyone?

No, let's continue relying on a single centralized service for the whole world.

[+] sneak|5 years ago|reply
This isn't the panacea you think it is. For example, on iOS all server notifications for an app must be proxied via Apple and have to come from the app developer's push certificate.

This means that even with Element (the matrix client) all of your notifications when your phone is locked are going from your server to the centralized dev push system run by the Element devs, then to another centralized system run by Apple.

Either could have an outage, although I think APNS (the apple side) has close to 100% uptime since launch, which is quite a feat.

[+] etimberg|5 years ago|reply
Instagram also seems down, so likely something generic affecting faceebook's infrastructure
[+] phreack|5 years ago|reply
Even Telegram is suffering from a slightly degraded service, likely from the load of everyone jumping to it at once as a backup IM.
[+] rvz|5 years ago|reply
And no. The same people won't flock to Signal after all of this, even though it is much more friendlier than Element.

On the other hand, at least Element is decentralised thanks to Matrix, but unfortunately suffers from a naming dilemma and is unfriendlier than the rest of the chat alternatives.

We need an alternative that is a mixture of both: Open source, Decentralised (Likely uses Matrix underneath) and is extremely user friendly and competes on security and features.

[+] tuwtuwtuwtuw|5 years ago|reply
No, you need an alternative which is used by some substantial portion of people.
[+] csjr|5 years ago|reply
Can confirm. Instagram is also down here.
[+] bukhtarkhan|5 years ago|reply
this is exactly why we need 1000000 different messaging apps lol
[+] totalZero|5 years ago|reply
that, or just one app that uses multiple pathways and protocols to get the message across
[+] mimarko|5 years ago|reply
What, in some regions??? Better to say in almost all regions
[+] sparkling|5 years ago|reply
FB up but very slow, Instagram and Whatsapp down

Germany