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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

I assume this outage is costing millions per hour. And it's not exactly great advertising for Facebook, either. I doubt very much they would do something like this on purpose.

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Dividing up last quarters $29B revenue leads to approximately $13.4M per hour of downtime, now past $53M after the 4 hour mark.

But I haven't paid this much attention to Facebook in over a year.

That doesn't make a lot of sense though - Facebook generates revenue primarily from ad traffic (on all sorts of sites). It needs to be up for reputation and to harvest ever more detail for 'improving' those ads, sure, but not for revenue. (Modulo blip from ads on its own site.)

So you can't just divide over time like that.

What? It absolutely needs to be up -- those ads being served are on Facebook and Insta, not display banners on random sites.

That's what I meant by 'ads on its own site' - but I was under the impression that Facebook generated most revenue from selling data/ads for display elsewhere (as well as on Facebook.com itself, and other subsidiaries). Perhaps I was wrong about that? Quick search shows up 'audience network', but I'm not sure to what extent that's what I was thinking of.

Nope, for the most part all the ads that Facebook serves are for facebook owned sites and properties. They don't sell data, or have general ad placements on 3rd party websites.

wow...

It sounds like they are not even able to serve ads, on any property. So while far from perfect, it's probably a decent estimate without doing in-depth analysis.

Sounds like a drop in the bucket for them.

Right, I know that, and I usually try to avoid conspiratorial thinking, but man, Zuck doesn't make it easy.

I'm just trying to process that FB is having its historic, all-networks global outage today of all days. And I bet FB would have paid double of whatever this will eventually cost them to make that story go away.

Unless “they” were one or two disgruntled employees with the access, know-how, and motive to execute a “mistake”. Emphasis added.

If it was intentional, that's serious jail time territory. That's a high price to pay for such limited downtime. I'm pretty sure an intentionally malicious actor with that type of access could do much worse things.

I’m pretty sure the vast majority of entry level spy craft is about convincing people to do highly illegal and destructive things from a place of fear.

Not saying this is the work of spies, just that it’s not unimaginable to think some middle manager could convince themselves or a subordinate to do something drastically illegal out of some fear that terrible things would happen otherwise.

I'm curious as to what law, exactly, they would be breaking. Sabotage in the US code is defined mostly in terms of war material and damages done to physical "national defense" properties. Certainly an employee would be fired and sued by the company, but is deliberately changing a routing policy (and not something like a worm or virus that deletes or otherwise degrades hardware and software) a crime?

IANAL but I would assume computer fraud and abuse act:

(5)(a)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;

That’s the one.

The recent Van Buren decision would make that unlikely.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27389500

In the cases cited under the CFAA (such as https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=124545279862007...) it seems the employee deleted data and private info. In this case, no data was deleted or other computing property damaged it just became unreachable.

Proof of intent is a significant burden placed upon prosecution. If that can be overcome, there’s legal precedent for criminal conviction namely under the CFAA.

https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-co...

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