I hope we get something more substantial and informative than that over the next couple of weeks, but it doesn't seem (at least from my searching) that Facebook is in the business of publicly posting in-depth post-mortems for their outages, which I personally find unfortunate.

This is Hacker News, so the distinction between network performance, server performance and application performance should matter.

"The Internet" did not slow down. "The Internet" infact probably had more available capacity as a result of Facebook's outage, as all those bits of outrage and cats ceased to be transferred for the duration.

Some applications may have seen performance hits, as a result of poorly thought out dependencies on an external service without graceful failure.

Some applications may have seen increased load and suffered due to server resourcing constraints, caused by applications like the above failing to fail gracefully, and instead polling more aggressively.

> They don't have a right to privacy here, and we are all owed an explanation

Morally / ethically, you're right. The fact that Facebook exists in it's current form tells me that morals and ethics aren't particularly important to the real world.