Is Facebook down? (Oct. 5, 9:28PM PST) | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook down? (Oct. 5, 9:28PM PST)

facebook.com

28 pointsbkhl32 comments

Facebook isn't working for me. I'm getting this error via Chrome:<p>Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error.

EDIT: It's back for me (9:55PM PST)

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Yep. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.facebook.com

Really no need for this to go on the front page though...

You shouldn't trust that website.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.amazon.com

And this really does need to go on the front page because far too many startups are using Facebook Login, and the recent partnership with YC to get YC startups hooked on the FB platform.

What's the reason for it thinking www.amazon.com is always down?

This was discussed a few days ago, and I completely agree.

If you rely on a buggy platform, and it fails, you subsequently have your site fail. This is a perfect example of exactly how this goes about, too.

Deleted comment

What a fantastic explosion of buzzwords and slightly bizarre assertions.

I know you interned at Facebook and are familiar with the site architecture, but the majority of the things you've mentioned here had absolutely nothing to do with the last outage, and it's far too early to draw any conclusions about the current unavailability.

This sounds interesting but you're using a lot of jargon, could expand on it?

I know the thundering herd problem is when a resource goes away and then everybody tries to fetch it the moment it comes back up, sending it down again. What is the subscription update model you're referring to, and to what portion of the system does it apply? I was under the impression that user stream updates were distributed somewhat asynchronously, and were heavily cached, but I could be wrong.

I was unaware of BigPipe, but a good explanation is here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...

However, I don't understand what you mean by a streaming model as it applies to web page generation.

fyi HPHP is HipHop php

Today I had downtime with tumblr, reddit, foursquare, dropbox, twitter, and facebook. Weird.

looks like fb took starcraft 2 down with it, damn true id 'feature'

Down for me (2010-10-05 9.31PST). Again?

The Like buttons and Facebook Connect are also affected. When Facebook goes down like this, huge numbers of websites are affected.

And.. why is it down now and not when I was working? At least, it helped me become a bit more productive last time. This time, it's just ruining my night. ;)

Use twitter if you want to find out if FB is down, not HN.

I wasn't really asking if it is down. When I submitted the post, I already confirmed that it is down. This is a major problem for the whole internet now that a lot of of websites use Facebook Connect and other APIs. Some businesses run on Facebook. It's a news. Definitely tech related. Definitely interesting for HN aficionados.

No, not really news. Sites fail all the time, cluttering up HN with posts like this are a waste of time.

What is interesting is the postmortem of a failure. Post that when it is available.

and this makes me believe why facebook can't be Google

Hm. Don't you remember when GMail was down? :P

how come no one is blaming PHP for Facebook downtime like Rails was blamed for Twitter </sarcasm> :D

PS: Let the downvoting begin

To be fair, people stopped blaming Rails for Twitter a while back, after it became clear that the problem was mostly at the data level.

Likewise, nobody (well, except liuliu) is blaming PHP for Facebook's downtime, since last time they blamed it on a poorly-handled failure case after an accidental misconfiguration:

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-deta...

actually http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1762739

Hopefully they're rolling out their redesign

Facebook rolls our code changes independent of product releases. They just need to flip a configuration switch (usually for a small percentage of users at first) to launch a product, not release code. This can still cause site issues, but usually just some error message, not the entire site being down.

This does not look intentional. If they were just rolling out a front-end change, they wouldn't have killed their APIs like Connect and the Like buttons.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/05/facebook-redesign-lockdown/

Containing a link to the Facebook Lockdown group, which obv no-one can see...

Yep, Still down http://www.downornot.com/facebook

Back up, but was down for me for a good ten minutes.

Back up? Not for me or for http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com

Back up for me as well now. Performance is certainly slow and getting a few server errors, but that's more than there was a few minutes ago.

It's back up for me (9:55PM PST)

yep :)

It's up here.

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