Facebook was down | Hacker News Reader

Facebook was down

facebook.com

101 pointsjonny_eh54 comments

Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don't crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don't you get that?

Guess it's time to test this theory, huh?

It's had outages before. Facebook is more entrenched now than it was back in 2005. I think they'll survive.

Compared to the multi-day outages common to cash-strapped startups back in the day, I don't think Facebook is going to suffer unless this happens really frequently.

Appears that the status page over at https://developers.facebook.com/status/ isn't loading properly either. I see either a "The connection to developers.facebook.com was interrupted while the page was loading." erorr or a "Service Unavailable" page.

Not ideal for a status page.

It does actually convey the fact that everything is down pretty well

More like demonstrate.

It just loaded for me and says that everything is fine today. That also defeats the purpose.

It's been updated:

https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/45182228835901...

Someone needs to go update it, you know…

Apparently, but not necessarily.

The status page should probably be the link for the story now, since they're back up. At least until there's a better story about why they were down.

Weird that the link is for ?down=true

I thought this is some kind of prank, but http://facebook.com is also showing up as down.

HN doesn't allow for duplicate links[^1] so the submitter used the query string to bypass that.

[^1]: There's some new rules about this IIRC but I don't remember exactly what cases allow for duplicate links now.

that was probably to get around the duplicate url check.

It was. There was another post here from 271 days ago that linked directly to facebook.com, also reporting an outage.

From: https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/45182228835901...

"A Facebook-wide issue means the Facebook Graph API is temporarily unavailable. We're working with our core infrastructure teams to identify the issue and will update you when we have more information."

I'm posting it here since it's loading intermittently.

Their Status page says "Facebook Platform is Healthy" but the page itself fails to load intermittently: https://developers.facebook.com/status/

productivity across the globe is skyrocketing

Except if you're working on Facebook iOS integration. Dammit Facebook! What are the odds.

Hopefully it spreads to HN!

Naw everyone is just reading "Facebook is down" threads.

Status Page says they pushed new code at 9:28am PST, or right when these errors started.

Whoopsies!

Build fast and break things.

Ha, I actually just saw this myself and the first thing I did was switch tabs to Hacker News to see if it was being discussed.

But yeah, it seems to be back up now.

They're serving a 503 page now: "503 No server is available for the request"

Looks like it's mostly back up, but a bit slow. Isn't this around the time they do their morning code push?

EDIT: Ads don't seem to be loading, and the sidebar doesn't load intermittently.

Still down in Winnipeg. Alternating between a FB error page and a white page with "Service Unavailable."

This is the error message I receive when I go to the site with cookies:

Sorry, something went wrong.

We're working on it and we'll get it fixed as soon as we can.

Go Back

Interesting it is dated 2014 and that it is a generic message without any helpful prompts.

Incognito mode shows the normal sign up screen.

Here's the data from Facebook's three outages over the past month: http://bit.ly/1JAYG9X

moreover, many of the sites that rely on facebook login are down too...

That's the part that worries me more.

Looks like isitdownrightnow.com is being DoS'd as a result

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ Is still up

http://sitemeer.com works too

Reminds me of the scene in Social Network where Zuckerberg is screaming at Saverin on the phone about impending loss of money and subsequent downtime...

The productivity of millions of people just went up :-)

Anyone noticed the 2014 at the bottom? I guess their traditional static 404 needs some updating? :D (I am sure this is not the case)

It is a relief for me to know that I found out about it after reading a tweet about it on Twitter.

Wow, first thing I did too was check HN for updates on this.

"Push completed 24 minutes ago"

And

"Major outage, started 21 minutes ago"

Related?

Crazy! Good thing I'm using Whatsapp :)

This should make for a good postmortem.

I hope we do actually get a postmortem this time... The outage seems to have come from a code push, and wasn't down too long. They only seem to do postmortems when the problem stems from anything other than code.

Their mobile app (iOS) is working fine

Back up now

Weirdly I can get in, but it only shows me two items from my feed with a "click here for more" button.

Seems like some sort of load mitigation mode.

Not for me.

Now it is back up for me, but sporadically. If I refresh it's sometimes still down.

Not to me

Yup, looks down again =/

Doesn't work in Bermuda.

What do you do in Bermuda?

Back now.

Instead of hackers, XI came personally to collect data. FB is just being cautious ;)

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