Ask HN: Is this a distraction while FB deletes incriminating evidence? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is this a distraction while FB deletes incriminating evidence?

7 pointsColinWright6 comments

Speculation:

"There's an argument to be made that, while Facebook is off-line, they're sweeping through their storage arrays looking for anything and everything that could implicate them in a hearing, and disposing of that evidence."

-- https://mathstodon.xyz/web/statuses/107045234735019624

Entire conversation: https://www.solipsys.co.uk/Chartodon/107045387088565341.svg

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Incredibly uninformed takes about how things work, such as this, is why conspiracy theorists get dunked on all the time. Could they have wiped FB off the internet in order to "cover their tracks"? Sure. Is it a verifiable fact that the type of event that would cause that, a BGP issue, has occurred? Also yes. Does anyone with the slightest understanding of cloud infrastructure, storage, computing, etc. really think this is anything other than another in a long string of BGP issues? Not a chance.

AFAIK the whistleblower already provided all the internal reports to the SEC and possibly the media. While a coverup is not impossible it would be incredibly high legal risk to put on employees. Also, such a massive BGP outage will draw a lot of attention and investigations into their networks and calls from investors. This has already impacted their stock value.

If I were them and planned to cover things up, I would do it quietly and discretely using someone with the highest privs possible and that knew how to cover their tracks. It is highly unlikely anyone would know the data is gone until someone went looking for it.

So no, I don't think this is a likely scenario.

Software related conspiracy theories are the worst

They wouldn’t need to bring the site down to do all that. That’s not how scaled infrastructure works.

A massive service outage like this could help in some ways. Bypassing usual change control, bypassing logged auth systems, missing logs as log servers were inaccessible, bypassing physical access controls in DCs to implement emergency fixes...

I have absolutely no beliefs in any direction at this point but a major service outage (I can't imagine how it could have been much worse) could act as cover for either internal nefarious actions or even a bad actor if they were quick/prepared enough to exploit the situation.

Yup, not a coincidence what with the damning new report from 60 minutes.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/03/tech/facebook-whistleblower-6...

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