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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

I know everyone on HN loves to hate on Facebook, but the fact that HN's servers are getting crushed when FB is down perhaps shows a revealed preference.

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Or it could be as simple as everyone wants to discuss one of the biggest tech companies suffering such a massive outage, combined with the aforementioned FB-haters basking in this moment.

As the CEO of a social network with more active users than Facebook, I am very confident in my analysis.

I see what you did there

LOL. I haven't come across you before today (so, not sure if this is a joke), but for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook.

> for the past few hours every social network has more active users than Facebook

That's literally the joke.

Following Twitter, HN is top 2 places to check during an outage.

It could be more than that. Vodafone broadband Internet (used to be UPC) is down in all of Czech Republic since about an hour. Their website is down (vodafone.cz), their mobile Internet seems slow. Coincidence?

If you change your DNS servers, it works! Their DNS servers probably crashed due to FB's DNS not resolving! (https://twitter.com/BlazejKrajnak)

I tried changing DNS server, including 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1, nothing doing.

I looked up Facebook IP address and tried to go there directly, bypassing the DNS. No response.

(I don't care about Facebook much, it was a test. WhatsApp though I have to use to communicate with relatives.)

I don't use Facebook, but I'm very curious about why it's down. I'm sure I'm not alone in my curiosity about one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

Not really. I noticed a lot of greyed-out comments cheering on Facebook being down

I think it's mix of signalling respect for the people impacted by this, the people who work there and are just trying to be decent and of course the fan boys.

The first place my mind went to after I read this was "dumb fucks" (Google this with Zuckerberg for context) but as good as the schadenfreude feels it doesn't change the very real and negative impacts from all of this.

Are you suggesting that HN being under a greater load has something to do with people hopping on HN instead of Facebook as they'd normally do? That seems like a reach.

I'm more of a 'shit on Facebook' man myself but I'm not above hate.

I find it hard to find fault with people expressing disgust with how knowingly predatory and exploitative the company's leadership have proven themselves to be.

Exhibit A: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58678332

I was afraid that it meant HN depended on Facebook infrastructure somehow. If the explanation is "Facebook is more popular and people flock to HN when it's down" -- that is a relief. I don't think that is the best explanation, though.

But maybe it's a failure with wider scope than just Facebook's DNS. Or an attack that targeted both FB and HN (and others)? Wild speculation at this point.

I'm not a Facebook user, and I'm a casual HN user. I heard Facebook was down, so I checked HN. I bet that's the source of the problem. If you know about HN and you hear Facebook's down, you check HN to see what people are saying.

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