Facebook App Outage Postmortem | Hacker News Reader

Facebook App Outage Postmortem

developers.facebook.com

38 pointslacker15 comments

Compare this with Google's "API infrastructure outage incident report" from earlier this year [1], you'll notice many headings, like a Summary, Timeline, Root Cause, Resolution and recovery, Corrective and Preventative Measures, which have detailed times and numbers.

Maybe we (the IT community) need a framework for incident reports or postmortems, or just use Google's as a model?

[1] http://googledevelopers.blogspot.ca/2013/05/google-api-infra...

I doubt this is the internal audit of the outage event. At least I hope it isn't, but I could be wrong. The template from Google isn't super uncommon and I bet most organizations that really want to drill in and understand root causes and prevent recurrence use something very similar to it (if the organization is serious about uptime and if they're successful at reducing recurrence).

It doesn't seem crazy to me that Facebook's publicly facing summary of this is as casual as this seems to be. They owned up to breaking their platform and indicate they're taking measures to not do it again. But if the person who's internally accountable for analyzing this and preventing recurrence told me "we're building better tools" without any specifics about those tools, who's got accountability, or the timeline they anticipate putting those in place, I'd say they should pack their bags, so I bet there's a more detailed plan internally. I'm also not a facebook app developer, though, and if I had any revenue depending on not being shut down like this, I might be more frustrated with this either a) poor level of transparency (giving them the benefit of the doubt) or b) poor depth of analysis.

> At least I hope it isn't, but I could be wrong.

I used to work at Facebook, and this is most definitely not the internal audit. A lot of Facebook engineers are former Googlers, and bring a lot of the culture and practices with them. You can rest assured that people are hunkering down in a conference room as we speak.

That said, Google's postmortems are a thing of awe and distributed widely within the company.

Facebook has some of the best uptime in the industry, so they're a company that I'm inclined to believe when they post stuff like this.

Compared to what other companies?

The idea of 'uptime' is kinda meaningless for Facebook since the site can be 'up' with dozens of critical features being in a degraded state.

For example, I haven't been able to view friends' profile pages on FB for days now... blank pages in any browser on any machine as long as I'm signed in. I'm sure they'll notice they broke it sometime in the next month and fix it.

Compared to whom, exactly? The unreliability of Facebook's developer platform is practically a meme now.

On an orthogonal note. Seeing an image of a man smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer next to the post-mortem doesn't exactly inspire confidence. This really seems to be pushing the limits of professionalism.

Because people who smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol couldn't possibly write a technical post-mortem.

If it makes you feel any better, that photo of me is from our holiday party - and the 'cigarette' is a prop (I do not smoke). The manhattan in the other hand was real and delicious.

That's the part of this post you find unprofessional?

Unlike, say, every single action actually described in the text...

This is anything but a "post-mortem".

I'm tempted to ask how the production data differed from the data in the test environment on which they ran these potentially destructive tools first, but I'm afraid that would be interpreted as rhetorical sarcasm.

Seriously though, how on earth do you even get the idea to initiate such an operation without a) testing it against realistic data, and b) doing a dry run against the live data first before you decide to pull the trigger and start terminating applications?

And to top it all off, there was no roll back scenario and the restore process was buggy, which means it wasn't tested properly either.

I'm all for "move fast and break things", but this is a complete joke.

The organizational chaos that leads talented engineers to operate this way must be a nightmare.

Yet the market cap of the company is currently $111 billion. There's a lesson for us (or an opportunity) in there somewhere.

And nothing of value was lost.

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