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Facebook Down?

260 points| gamerDude | 5 years ago |facebook.com

197 comments

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[+] kickling|5 years ago|reply
Love the status page right now. https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/

PS. Instagram app/site, whatsapp.com, messenger.com, oculus.com also down, anything else?

UPDATE: Everything back up! (Even the status page)

[+] aarongolliver|5 years ago|reply
Finally a status page that updates the moment an issue starts
[+] setpatchaddress|5 years ago|reply
for posterity:

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html lang="en" id="facebook">
    <head>
      <title>Error</title>
      <meta charset="utf-8"/>
      <meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache"/>
      <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
      <style>
        html, body { color: #333; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Tahoma', 'Verdana', 'Arial', sans-serif; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
        #header { height: 30px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: center;}
        #icon { width: 30px;}
        .core { margin: auto; padding: 1em 0; text-align: left; width: 904px;}
        h1 { font-size: 18px;}
        p { font-size: 13px;}
        .footer { border-top: 1px solid #ddd; color: #777; float: left; font-size: 11px; padding: 5px 8px 6px 0; width: 904px;}
      </style>
    </head>
    <body>
      <div id="header">
        <a href="//www.facebook.com/">
          <img id="icon" src="//static.facebook.com/images/logos/facebook_2x.png"/>
        </a>
      </div>
      <div class="core">
        <h1>Sorry, something went wrong.</h1>
        <p>We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.</p>
        <p>
          <a id="back" href="//www.facebook.com/">Go Back</a>
        </p>
        <div class="footer"> Facebook &#xA9; 2021 &#xB7; <a href="//www.facebook.com/help/">Help</a></div>
      </div>
      <script>
        document.getElementById("back").onclick = function() {
          if (history.length > 1) {
            history.back();
            return false;
          }
        };
      </script>
    </body>
  </html>
And the png does not load.
[+] cure|5 years ago|reply
Seriously, they host the status page on their own infrastructure? That's ... not smart.
[+] DavidPeiffer|5 years ago|reply
Anecdotally, whatsapp worked for me (message was sent and received successfully) though Facebook gave an error. I was already logged into both services.
[+] css|5 years ago|reply
It loads fine for me and shows no downtime or incidents. It even says "Facebook Platform is Healthy"
[+] threatripper|5 years ago|reply
Do they share infrastructure?
[+] alexcnwy|5 years ago|reply
Even the status page is down
[+] grensley|5 years ago|reply
I like that it doesn't know that anything went wrong.
[+] mullingitover|5 years ago|reply
We're obviously going to take this opportunity to dunk of facebook because it's funny, but let's not forget that there are some valuable cultural assets that facebook hosts, with groups such as "Foods with threatening auras" and "Animals in predicaments."

I long ago tamed the facebook engagement algorithm by simply unfollowing everything and everyone except these legitimate, useful types of entertainment venues.

[+] ben509|5 years ago|reply
Don't forget "The Same Photo of a Gravel Pile Every Day." Almost makes the decline of Western civilization worth it.
[+] evad3r|5 years ago|reply
I love these appreciation posts so much more than the typical Facebook-hating comments you get on Reddit in contrast. Yes, we know, FB is evil, but it doesn't mean there isn't actually some good stuff on there.
[+] tamaharbor|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps society can rebuild if this continues.
[+] sgt|5 years ago|reply
I hope they get FB back up and running within the end of the year, otherwise I may actually start missing it.
[+] pope_meat|5 years ago|reply
I walked away from fb a year and half ago, and I don't miss any of it.

Hope it stays down, it would be an overall net gain for humanity.

[+] rc202402|5 years ago|reply
I like how you're nostalgic, yet hate fb at the same time.
[+] grensley|5 years ago|reply
How on earth does EVERYTHING go down like this? It just seems unfathomable to me. Where is the single point of failure?
[+] lovedswain|5 years ago|reply
The global outage drinking game:

bad DNS config push - 1 shot

routing loop - 2 shots

third party advertising your routes - 3 shots

power outage at data centre it turns out everything depends on despite decades and millions in engineering to avoid precisely that - 4 shots

Wolves ate through fiber - 5 shots

And it was a full moon - 6 shots

Single service failure, but service has not been restarted in 5 years, and no longer restarts in any documented fashion - 7 shots

And service developers left the company to found a startup - 8 shots

Expired internal SSL certificate - 9 shots

Daylight savings changeover-induced database corruption - 10 shots

Windows Update - 11 shots

[+] cure|5 years ago|reply
Probably DNS. It's always DNS ;)
[+] nonameiguess|5 years ago|reply
Large scale network partitioning can happen. Data center ingress/egress can go down. If you shard to multiple data centers, it's still possible for an entire autonomous system to have an interconnect with a different AS break. That is rare as hell with the actual Internet because of all the route redundancy even between ASes, but I've seen it happen on more specialized networks. For a few days last year, the entire western half of the US was cutoff from the eastern half on Raytheon's internal TS network because someone digging a hole somewhere accidentally cut the wrong fiber line.
[+] jscheel|5 years ago|reply
DNS (not necessarily this case, but man it can bring things down fast)
[+] rogerdickey|5 years ago|reply
How does it stay up as much as it does :)
[+] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
I'll be curious about it coming back up. It's the sort of site where there's an army of people continually trying to reload the page if something isn't working.
[+] chaos_emergent|5 years ago|reply
Probably an intern doing something dumb.
[+] aerosmile|5 years ago|reply
Likely not related, but you can imagine that they are quite busy these days with two unplanned projects:

1. Retooling the underpinnings of their ad analytics to survive iOS14. Big advertisers are about to lose a lot of their insights into attribution, partially directly related to the new limitations of iOS14, and partially due to assumptions that Facebook had made about tracking and which are no longer accurate and require a big rewrite.

2. Building an internal Shopify to allow customers to click on ads and complete transactions without ever leaving their app. This already exists but is practically unusable and nowhere close to the polish of Shopify.

[+] thrusong|5 years ago|reply
I'm getting two different error pages with the same "Sorry, something went wrong. We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can" message.

One has the older site look, copyright 2020, the other has the newer FB5 look, copyright 2021.

The logo is not loading on either page.

Part of me wonders if they discovered a big/new hole that led to the data leak, although Instagram being down too suggests maybe there's something happening behind the load balancers?

[+] cdgore|5 years ago|reply
I'm seeing the same thing in NYC.
[+] WesolyKubeczek|5 years ago|reply
I thought they banned me. Retried in an incognito window.

Time to enjoy a brief social media pause, thanks to the deity who might have been behind this!

[+] mikaelaast|5 years ago|reply
To be a fly on the wall at Facebook HQ right now...
[+] vdfs|5 years ago|reply
It's empty anyway
[+] wqsz7xn|5 years ago|reply
Weird that people almost celebrating in this thread? Facebook is a tool like any other and is only 'bad' if you allow that to happen.
[+] rossdavidh|5 years ago|reply
That's like saying that any Turing complete language is equivalent. Some languages encourage you to do things well, others do not. It was totally possible to write code with a lot of "GOTO" statements in it that was well structured, but the actual real-world results with it were bad. It may be possible to use FB in a constructive way, but that doesn't mean we are better off having it.
[+] ben509|5 years ago|reply
Social media is a square wheel. Sure, it sort of goes and if you know no alternative, it might be better than no wheel at all. But there's no good way to use it because it's fundamentally flawed.
[+] pmlnr|5 years ago|reply
My hammer - a tool - doesn't want me to look at more ads. No, FB is not a tool.
[+] atourgates|5 years ago|reply
Of course the first time in months I've used any of Facebook API services, and they go down mid-implementation.
[+] type0|5 years ago|reply
I wish wholeheartedly that it stays down for a long-long time, long enough to loose it's relevance.
[+] tomc1985|5 years ago|reply
And of course Instagram tells me, "No Internet Connection"

Like you couldn't connect to your server dude, don't pass the blame on!

[+] abujazar|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps they had to patch some critical vulnerability like the one that exposed 533M personal records and did the right thing by pressing the red button™