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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

> The outage has pretty much buried that story,

Strongly disagree. The outage has millions of people entering "Facebook" into their search engines. Most engines will conveniently put related news at the top of the search results page. The most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower.

Plus everyone has a lot of spare time to read the article now that Facebook and Instagram are down.

The outage didn't bury the story. It amplified it. Any suggestions that Facebook did this on purpose don't even make sense.

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> recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower

With respect I am pretty sure that the most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is this one.

Holistically I agree that this isn't the kind of distraction Facebook wants, although it tickles me to imagine Mark in the datacenter going Rambo with a pair of wire cutters.

Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/10/what-happened-to-faceboo...

Yeah but journalists are happy to connect the dots between the two stories and honestly my brain loves the coincidence of these two thingy being clustered: but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

That is in no way gonna make people forget the whistleblower story - if anything, it's gonna increase the antipathy to having a single point of failure. Face it, everyone hates FB, even the people who spend the most time on it.

datacenterS

> Strongly disagree. The outage has millions of people entering "Facebook" into their search engines. Most engines will conveniently put related news at the top of the search results page. The most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower.

I am seeing 0 news about the whistleblower when I google Facebook. Only outage news.

Every outage piece of news I'm seeing mentions the whistleblower.

Who reads the article? If I google "Facebook" to see if there's an outage, I see the first headline that says it's an outage and leave. Maybe curious few percent will.

This wasn't the case six hours ago. I checked, there were scattered outage stories and all whistle blower

Anecdotal, but I just tried Google + Bing and topline Facebook-related news is all about the outage.

Also anecdotal, but I didn't know about the whistleblower until I searched Twitter for "facebook" when I learned about the outage.

I also didn't know about the whistleblower until seeing it as a top tweet, however...

The whistleblower is kinda silly

If FB could increase revenue by having a "safer" algorithm then of course they would. Every company is just trying to increase revenue..

> Any suggestions that Facebook did this on purpose don't even make sense.

Unless another disgruntled employee knew it would amplify the story.

Sample size of one but a quick google shows me zero whistleblower news and 100% outage news.

https://i.imgur.com/IaSoR0w.png

1 article about the whistleblower and 2 about the outage. Both about the outage also mention the whistleblower, so you could say that's 100% of coverage at least mentions the whistleblower.

Also 1 out of 3 tweets also mentions the whistleblower.

I'm one of those who had no idea about the whistleblower story, but I learned of it through reading about Facebook network outage.

Yeah but reading about it but also being able to communicate about it on the largest network (the one in question too) are 2 separate phenomena. No one can go on there right now and say I'm deleting my account, who's with me?

Not at all. I just tried searching for "Facebook" on Google. The whistleblower story is not on the first page of search results. The outage is mentioned half a dozen times on that same page.

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