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Comment by cdown | Hacker News Reader

Hey! Facebook engineer here. If you have it, can you send me the User-Agent for these requests? That would definitely help speed up narrowing down what's happening here. If you can provide me the hostname being requested in the Host header, that would be great too.

I just sent you an e-mail, you can also reply to that instead if you prefer not to share those details here. :-)

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I'm not sure I'd publicly post my email like that, if I worked at FB. But congratulations on your promotion to "official technical contact for all facebook issues forever".

My e-mail address is already public from my kernel commits and upstream work. :-)

Don't think I used my email for anything important doing my time at FB. If it gets out of hand he could just make a request to have a new primary email made and use the above one for "spam"

Curiousity question: does FB use Gmail/Google suite?

My impression is that they pretty much roll their own communication suite.

That’s somewhat correct

But at least for email/calendar backend its exchange

The internal replacement clients for calendar and other things are killer...have yet to find replacements

For the most part though they use Facebook internally for messaging and regular communication (technically now Worplace but before it was just Facebook)

Email is really just for external folks

FB uses Office365 for email. It was on-premise Exchange many many years ago, but moved "to the cloud" a while back.

Feels odd to read Facebook uses office365/exchange for emails. they haven't built their fsuite yet, I thought they would simply promote Facebook messenger internally. I'm only half joking.

Most communication is via Workplace (group posts and chat). Emails aren't very common any more - mainly for communication with external people and alerting.

I don't want to share my website for personal reasons, but here is some data from cloudflare dashboard (a request made on 11 Jun, 2020 21:30:55 from Ireland, I have 3 requests in the same second from 2 different IPs)

user-agent: facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php) ip 1: 2a03:2880:22ff:3::face:b00c (1 request) ip 2: 2a03:2880:22ff:b::face:b00c (2 requests) ASN: AS32934 FACEBOOK

Yes requests are still coming. Thanks CloudFlare for saving my ass.

Hey,

I can by the way confirm this issue. I work in a large newspaper in Norway and around a year ago we saw the same issue. Thousands of requests per second until we blocked it . And after we blocked it, traffic to our Facebook page also plummeted. I assume Facebook considered our website down and thus wouldn't give users content from our Facebook page either as that would serve them content that would give a bad user experience. The Facebook traffic did not normalize before the attack stopped AND after we told Facebook to reindex all our content.

I'd you want more info, send me a email and il dig out some logs etc. thu at db.no

Thanks for looking at this!

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