What happened on the Internet during the Facebook outage | Hacker News Reader

What happened on the Internet during the Facebook outage

blog.cloudflare.com

121 pointsjgrahamc34 comments

> The robots went silent. What about the traffic coming to our CDN sites from Facebook User-Agents? The gap is indisputable. We see about 30% of a typical request rate hitting us. But it's not zero; why is that? We'll let you know a little secret. Never trust User-Agent information; it's broken. User-Agent spoofing is everywhere.

That is an interesting way of finding out how many spoof connections exist for Facebook and who the spoofers are. Just take down Facebook and all the traffic that says to be Facebook is spoofing. Simple as that.

Yes. And we are using that information to better target those bots.

But guess what? iMessage adds Facebot and Twitterbot to its User—Agent when getting a preview when you send someone a link.

So, as ever, shit’s complicated in the real world.

Interesting, but makes sense. want to do previews, look like a preview bot - presumably there's also some sites that serve preview metadata only to such user agents.

You don't need anything to go down, just get a list of the subnets within their BGP ASN and filter those out, the rest are these spoofs. You can do this trivially at any time.

It's not necessarily spoofing. During the outage you could still open the FB app, at least on Android, and it would show you cached content. By default it opens links in the FB Browser, which was probably still working during the outage. So it shouldn't go to zero.

Example in-app browser UA, pulled from my server logs just now: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 11; Pixel 3 XL Build/RQ3A.210905.001; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/93.0.4577.82 Mobile Safari/537.36 [FB_IAB/FB4A;FBAV/337.0.0.32.118;]

I don't think the user agents under discussion are the UAs sent by the Facebook browser, but rather the ones sent by Facebook's crawlers.

The Facebook browser is distributed across all of humanity, so it'd be expected to have legitimate activity during the outage.

The Facebook crawlers, however, are presumably all behind the blackholed Facebook network, so any request purporting to be from a Facebook crawler is likely up to no good.

Is anyone else just stick and tired of hearing about cloudflare? They actually make the internet worse for me.

No.

Just endless captcha loops.

You may be interested in privacy pass: https://privacypass.github.io/

However if you are completely disabling cookies and connecting for a unreliable source (like a public wifi or TOR) then there is nothing to store that your session is trust worthy.

Have you tried not being a robot? Only robots would have this problem.

HAHA WHAT DO YOU MEAN, FELLOW HUMAN?

Or humans who use Tor and do not whish to install some kind of browser extension because of Cloudflare.

Funny how absolutely nothing changed for me during this outage everyone, their grandmas and their dogs seem to be talking about. I don't use Facebook. And nothing of value was lost. Amazing how they're a multibillion dollar company.

Hacker News was offline. Does it need Facebook to work?

Hacker News worked fine for me during the Facebook outage.

Worked for me too.

Maybe though, GP is meta, about how psyops efforts moved elsewhere.

Probably too silly but I found the thought fun. Hope you've enjoyed it too.

I could browse fine, but the one time during the outage that I attempted to post a comment it timed out.

Didn’t work for me. The reason I figured out about FB being down was searching for HN being down.

I learned on HN that Facebook etc. were down (at that very moment).

It was not offline. It was pretty slow - some requests failed entirely - but only for authenticated users which suggests the problem was server/database capacity as the unauthenticated pages served from cache were still very fast.

> ... the unauthenticated pages served from cache were still very fast.

Wouldn't those have been coming from Cloudflare, though?

Hacker News has not used Cloudflare for some time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496344

It does not. But a lot of people flocked to HN to see what is going on or because they did not have their other alternative.

I don’t buy this. My impression was that the slowness was sustained during the entire outage and then instantly let up once Facebook came back online.

I’m really curious why this was the case.

At the time, people were saying the slowdown went away if you logged out. I wanted to comment on things, so I didn't try it.

Trackers?

HN tends to slow down when there are very active discussion threads. The FB is down threads died down quite a bit when their site came back online. The threads for FB is back online had much sparser discussion.

There's not a whole lot of mystery here.

Those threads weren't particularly active. They aren't even the most active threads in the last month: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

That said, I can't claim that those threads didn't have more readers than other threads. But I can't say they they did either.

It also seems uniquely interesting that some people experienced the slowness but others did not.

If you loaded in private browsing (or logged out), HN was speedy as normal. If you're like me, from time to time you accidentally sign out and don't notice it until much later.

BGP side effect, like maybe FB DNS normally is answering (for some geographies) DNS queries reaching out to news.ycombinator.com ?

Hacker News worked flawlessly for me. Maybe your network had an issue/

IT'S NOT THE NETWORK!

Sincerely,

A Network Engineer

I definitely saw some error pages with the orange bar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com