Major Incident at Fastly

It's a status page, so do they need to fix the font color or the actual problem first?

HTML is accessible by default, so nobody really has to work on accessiblity; they just have to refrain from working on breaking it. Unfortunately that seems too difficult for many web designers.

I haven't seen so much barely visible grey text since the last Hacker News thread discussing current affairs.

I just ran the Chrome Lighthouse accessibility report again. They increased the contrast and went from 74 to 90. Well done!

As compared with 139 contrast errors on this HN page as of 2021-01-12 19:04 GMT: https://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://news.ycombinator.com...

You should use Firefox and toggle Reader Mode. No CSS changes necessary.

Luckily I think it’s on the way out, thank goodness. I agree that was an awful trend.

When asked why going with a light on light colored web page rendering readability to almost nil, the Designer spoke at length eloquently stating obscure mission statements, having the site born at the intersection of arts, activism and the global community at large. Finally they lastly mentioned "because its the right thing to do". /s

If you have something else other than text that you want to be the focus of the page like a photo, reducing the contrast on the text allows the photos "pop" more if it using the range of light and dark.

My personal color schemes are all dark background and light grey text. So even in my world of IDEs, consoles, gvim, sublime and emacs where text is king, I prefer having less than 100% contrast between background/text. I am not using any kind of custom color scheme so at least 1 other person prefers this as well!

There's an argument that high contrast ratios are too high on the eyes, which is why "not quite black" is used on "not quite white" backgrounds.

How people ran away on this to 50% brightness text on 70% brightness backgrounds is another question.

Isn't the idea here that they don't want people snooping around and hanging out on the part of their website that describes all the problems going wrong with their service?

How does any site in the US not run afoul of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)? Surely color choices like this are an issue that someone can raise; see WCAG 2.0 AA. which talks about how there must be a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between all text and background.

Even W3C reminds people that colors are important.

I was wondering what everyone was taking about. I totally forgot I installed the dark reader extension on my phone... Thanks for reminding me!

Thanks for the kind words, Andrew!

Redundant streams would definitely help mitigate the problem, but we're also days away from shipping a feature that would have allowed us to seamlessly switch over to another partner in a situation like this. C'est la vie.

there is a good chance that redundant streams would have helped here assuming that the player could load the manifest to fail over, but that manifest sadly hits Fastly. the problem with redundancy is that it really only works if you are redundant all the way up and down the serving stack. in our standard serving path (even without redundant streams) we automatically select the optimal CDN for chunk serving which does take into account availability, but during this incident we measured Fastly as about 5% less available than normal which wasn't enough to trigger a full automatic drain off of them. turns out, a 5% failure rate when you are serving 50 chunks to enable a video playback means 1 of them will likely fail and you get a playback error or in the best case, rebuffering.

sadly, Mux's manifest servers have not been redundant because the edge logic is a pile of Fastly's VCL. as mmcclure says, we're working on adding another CDN that can run our manifest serving logic so that we can be fully redundant.

I am really looking forward to a standard and portable edge platform that makes redundancy at this application layer easier. wasm here we come?