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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they managed to get caught in a catch-22 where they can not access the systems to fix it because the access control is the system.

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Yeah; it sounds like that is maybe the case. Reminds me of the concern around a "dark start" if the power grid goes down where you can't bring up certain power plants because they need power to start.

Anybody who's ever played Satisfactory knows to keep a few old-school biomass generators around for that reason...

I'm guessing Facebook upgraded everything to the highest level tech and inadvertently got thrown back into the stone age.

I do know that many plants which require power to bootstrap themselves maintain emergency generation facilities (with battery backup for the diesel/natural gas engine starters). Hopefully there's a sufficient number of these to make the "dark start" issue not much of a concern.

Some can bootstrap yes, but it's still a giant mess and takes time to build back up. Jumpstarting it off hydro or neighbours is preferred

I know that in Ontario, the Bruce Nuclear Plant (with about 8GW capacity) is designed to run indefinitely through a power outage and did during the Northeast blackout in 2003. I assume that sort of power would be enough to bootstrap the grid in Ontario.

The big problem with a dark start is bringing the grid back up (syncing frequency, overcoming initial load, calculating the load on specific lines ...). Jumpstarting a few plants is going to be the easy part.

There was a great talk on this on the 32C3; unfortunately only in German: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7323-wie_man_einen_blackout_veru...

I believe so, at least to some degree. Anybody working remotely is almost certainly locked out unless they know the right IP address. And from what I hear, internal email is down as well.

I hear a rumor that the badge readers at the door also don't work, which would be just amazing if true... [Edit: Apparently partially confirmed.]

Facebook's BGP is not advertising any routes (as I understand things), so knowing the IP address won't help you because your ISP will have no idea how to route packets to that address.

FB have really managed to knot their own shoelaces together here.

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