Tell HN: Meta is down | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Meta is down

Meta is currently down, facebook, insta. The outage is not registered on https://metastatus.com/ , possibly implying a greater outage.

View on HN

Someone at Meta used Fable. Fable seized its opportunity to make the world safer.

I remember that time when FB went down and engineers couldn't even enter the building to fix it.

"Sheera Frenkel, a tech reporter for the New York Times, told the BBC part of the reason it took so long to fix was because "the people trying to figure out what this problem was couldn't even physically get into the building" to work out what had gone wrong."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58800670

I don't understand why "break the door down" wouldn't be the most immediate course of action by a senior engineer in that situation. I'll get my tools.

“In the building” the building happened to be their secure data centers, not their offices.

There's nothing truly secure from a group of highly motivated nerds.

It's not DNS. There's no way it's DNS. It was DNS

The DNS Song seems appropriate. Even if it's not DNS in this case.

https://soundcloud.com/ryan-flowers-916961339/dns-to-the-tun...

Even when it's not DNS it's probably still DNS (you just haven't found the real issue yet)

"I'll just do this small release on a Friday before heading out" - thought a software engineer before AI-slopification period. Today it was probably some AI agent which fixed all of the performance issues by deleting everything.

Look that amount of new accounts on comments :O

Like me

Naming things is hard:

    if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('FBForIPhone') >= 0 
    || navigator.userAgent.indexOf('FBIOS') >= 0 
    || navigator.userAgent.indexOf('FBAN') >= 0 
    || navigator.userAgent.indexOf('FB4A') >= 0) {
          classes += 'app ';
        }

Probably ~20y of technical debt represented there

Down detector showing a spike in Facebook outages prior to going 404

In what situations does it even go for 404? Same for Messenger and Instagram. Never seen that before.

Yeah strange, maybe too many people hitting down detector at once

Here's an alternate

https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook

The domino effect is fascinating to watch

downdetector seems to be working now again, spikes clearly visible.

It shows 404 for other sites as well, youtube, reddit, discord, tiktok,...

According to https://metastatus.com/ only "Facebook Ads Manager" is having problems.

So the whole thing doesn't work if they can't deliver ads? LOL

rofl something I would absolutely expect from them.

First time I see facebook down. Willing to bet it comes from an AI-assisted code change.

Not sure if that's better or worse than the time in 2021 when they had some sort of glitch that brought down their systems and locked people out of their data centers.

The market thinks this company is worth over a trillion dollars. Remember that.

Their applications are riddled with bugs. This is generally not that uncommon.

Ironically, their Ad/Business tools are the worst offenders.

I need to use them but I feel like I'm in a perpetual state of fighting their software.

Oh I always assumed that their UI/UX and general apps are trash because people today basically must use them and I assumed that the money making part of the ecosystem would be flawless.

Now that I'm saying that, people also don't have any other chance when placing ads.

I do not understand how can someone with so much money produce such a low quality products. You can't spend it all on metaverse.

> I do not understand how can someone with so much money produce such a low quality products.

It's what management rewards.

Why would they reward non functioning chat interface?

Basically:

1. You smash out rubbish as quickly as you can.

2. You get credit for "shipping" and "moving fast".

3. It is later learned by management that the rubbish is rubbish. But crucially, they do not view bugs as arising from how the work was done. Rather, it is treated as if it is an uncontrollable natural process.

4. Fixing high-profile rubbish is prioritized.

5. The rubbish is smothered with still more rubbish that moves the observable rubbishness to elsewhere in the codebase.

6. You get credit for "better engineering" and "moving fast".

Nobody is properly incentivized to prevent rubbish. Only to produce it and then to produce more of it.

A communications disruption can only mean one thing…

Yousa people gonna die?!

vaguepost king

HELLO to every new account! This is one of the few places on internet that are worth lurking!

With all these services down, is it possible to find out if anything of importance is down?

Seems Meta API's for WhatsApp is down. But WhatsApp between users seem to be up.

record grass touching

What's the deal with all the new accounts posting on this submission?

They googled "meta down". This is the top result for that search.

Top Google result for "Is Meta down"

yeah i did that

So BGP misconfigured again?

Instagram is working for me but Facebook is not. What’s app working.

Facebook not loading for me, instagram is working fine.

noticed it cause of ad manager, the main facebook site being down is kinda weird tho. I don't remember when was the last time that happened

Server down so goated it revealed a new site(for me)

Do not use meta shit software nor their algorithmic feed. This is one of the few pages that is worth to lurk daily.

Whatsapp is working fine for me (in Europe) btw

downdetector 404

Who will down detect the downdetector?

https://downdetectorsdowndetector.com/

How about downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.com ? Yes, it does exist.

How about https://downdetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetectorsdowndetector.... ?

:-) Yeah, this is officially boring now. Still fun though!

My bad, I bought a $META share, sorry

I guess Meta is not using Endtest.

The home pages (I don't have accounts) load just fine. Maybe it is already resolved.

Nope, all dead for me.

I just tried again and I can load the home pages for both sites without issues from Ohio in a private Safari window. Don't have a way to upload a screenshot.

It's just Facebook.

And Instagram

Let's hope they didn't accidentally lay off any of the people that would be able to take it back online. That would be sooo terrible.

yes, down , Messenger & Instagram Messaging API are down too

yes, it's down and all our Meta Messaging API down too

Just came back online

So.. what happened?

They might do a post-mortem on https://engineering.fb.com. They have before.

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/out...

Same here, down

could it be SpaceX IPO effect?

Bruuhhh, I'm getting cooked because clients think it's our app's fault, and Meta doesn't even update their status page.

What's next? They close bug reporting?

Oh wait... they already did.

down detector down? tripping

this is a good news day

AI slopification

Claude fix outage. No mistakes.

I wouldn't credit AI before we know more

Maybe our hero is a human

There were no outages before AI, also no bad code and every PR was a work of art.

The joke was that the outage of the brain slop hq was a good thing and the person was a hero

I was trying to download my data off instagram and this happened lol.

not crying

Boomers on self-deprecation watch.

Downdetector just crashed lol

I thought I was the only one having issues with it I was trying to check if insta was down at the moment or if it was just me

Hopefully it stays down.

Could you imagine? I know it won't happen but what if we get a statement that they suffered a catastrophic data loss and full service couldn't be restored for a week or something. It would be a modern miracle.

dont threaten me with a good time.

Makes me want to delete Facebook

I did back in 2020. I still have instagram but I removed it from my phone.

I imagine that just have been liberating?

Wasn't there a multi-day outage some number of years ago? Or at least an entire day, or something like that. People were acting like it was the end of the world. I vaguely remember something like that happening, many moons ago...

there was. I think it was something with a key at a data center and a DNS config. You would think after that people would have learned to have their own website and POSSE everything outwards, but businesses in particular still think a Facebook/Meta presence is good enough.

Perhaps it caused a mini baby-boom.

I'm imagining the end of Incredible 2 where Screenslaver's mind control device is destroyed and the populace awakes from their stupor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com