[mfrommil]

A much better UX would be clear error messaging informing users that the service is down and there is no problem with their individual account.

This would prevent people from panicking they've been hacked and/or unnecessarily resetting their password.

[mns]

There are quite some harsh comments here below. You can't plan for every possible failure point, who knows what part of a system/infra out of everything that they have went down and triggered this behaviour. Some things you just can't catch/predict. Especially in huge systems like theirs. I would expect people here to understand things like these and not just call people names for something like this, we all know things seem simple/clear from the outside, but the job of debugging and fixing something like this take quite some effort.

[anigbrowl]

This is a company with one of the largest digital infrastructures in the world. An outage is understandable, inability to tell they're having an outage and inform users appropriately is not. Stop making excuses for people who are literally awash in resources.

[shkkmo]

You can't plan for every contigency, but you can reserve potentially scary message for situations where you know they are correct. An unpected error state should NOT result in a "invalid credentialiald error".

[Kalium]

You are absolutely correct. That would be a much better experience.

That said, getting there strikes me as pretty challenging. Automatically detecting a down state is difficult and any detection is inevitably both error-prone and only works for things people have thought of to check for. The more complex the systems in question, the greater the odds of things going haywire. At Meta's scale, that is likely to be nearly a daily event.

The obvious way to avoid those issues is a manual process. Problem there tends to be that the same service disruptions also tend to disrupt manual processes.

So you're right, but also I strongly suspect it's a much more difficult problem than it sounds like on the surface.

[seppel]

> That said, getting there strikes me as pretty challenging. Automatically detecting a down state is difficult and any detection is inevitably both error-prone and only works for things people have thought of to check for. The more complex the systems in question, the greater the odds of things going haywire. At Meta's scale, that is likely to be nearly a daily event.

Well, in principle, the frontend just has to distinguish between HTTP status 500 (something broken in the backend, not the fault of the user) and some HTTP status code 4xx (the user did something wrong).

[matsemann]

But there's something off here. I wouldn't expecting to be shown as logged out when the services are down. I'd expect calls to fail with something aka 500 and an error showing "something happen edited on our side". Not all the apps going haywire.

[boring_twenties]

Well you can't expect to hire engineers with half a brain for the pitiful compensation Meta offers, can you?

[eurekin]

There was for a brief moment. I got that once

[jonnycomputer]

It would be a better UX, but, depending on the outage, that might be a really hard behavior to guarantee.

[barbazoo]

Not the worst thing that a bunch of Facebook users are resetting their passwords.

[sandspar]

That's the sound of millions of "password" becoming "passwordnew"