Facebook

Dang if the site is certifiably down! I got bored with Facebook and haven't used it in years.

Never ever used it !!!!!

I remember when Facebook was not open to the general public and was mostly for students. It was pretty good back then.

Period!

Does this mean that people will be more angry, violent, suicidal today? Or does productivity go up....

I see no major loss of fb/insta/whats cease to exist.

I don't use it, the wifE dose

The world would be a lot better off without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I have never used it and I don’t think that I’m missing anything. I have a couple of sister-in-laws that used to use Facebook. One got so aggravated with all of the trash talking that she got off of it. The other one uses Facebook Marketplace to sell stuff. But, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook and the others should go the way of the Dodo bird.

I've been following this since it went down around 8:30 am PST yesterday. Apparently it was routing problem that brought it down. I was still able to resolve facebook.com to an IP and able to access their site by IP address but unable to log in.

Likely the opposite. Zuckerbook parleyed anger into longer sessions online into increased advertising revenue. Anger was (is) one of their tools.

Somehow their Name Record got removed from the Name Servers and Facebook disappeared from the Internet.

an interesting incident.

think of how many people are going to go into withdrawal without Facebook. Is it just a temporary issue?

They were back up by 6 PM EST.

This official statement from Facebook engineering is here:

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/out...

Regarding the event, I think the key quotation is "Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."

This reminds me of a very bad incident that affected USA long-distance telephone service decades ago. In trying to find an accounting of that incident I came across this very detailed accounting of a 1990 catastrophe, which arose from a single bug in C software which had been extremely heavily tested and had worked in actual revenue service for months.

A detailed CalPoly paper on this episode rewards your reading:
https://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/SWE/Papers/att_collap...

That one happened to "the old AT&T" not the Johnny-come-lately's who wear the name now. They were seriously paranoid about design, development, and testing to avoid this exact thing, and yet it happened.

The sticky point is, oddly enough, mishandling of something meant to add robustness. Under the wrong conditions, messaging meant to manage trouble could expand without adequate bound, giving system collapse. I suspect in very broad terms the Facebood event was somewhat similar.