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Facebook was down

facebook.com

270 pointsz0a268 comments

Apparently Facebook over IPv6 is working: https://www.v6.facebook.com

    % curl -I https://www.v6.facebook.com
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=7776000
    X-Frame-Options: DENY
    X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p"
    Pragma: no-cache
    X-XSS-Protection: 0
    Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate
    Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
    Set-Cookie: reg_fb_gate=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.v6.facebook.com%2F; path=/; domain=.facebook.com
    Set-Cookie: reg_fb_ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.v6.facebook.com%2F; path=/; domain=.facebook.com
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
    X-FB-Debug: [REDACTED]
    Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 08:03:22 GMT
    Connection: keep-alive
    Content-Length: 48441

So I'm guessing it's related to their IPv4 infrastructure. Say, a load balancer?

Not anymore. :)

Yep, IPv6 is down for me too.

Working for me, is it giving you an error 503 like the ipv4 ?

I'm getting a 503 on ipv4, but just no route to host on ipv6.

It isn't now, now, the link is redirecting to the same error page!

I think this would be the perfect "push" to get the world to transition to IPv6 :)

Interesting, maybe someone accidentally pressed the 'kill ipv4 interface' button?

Progress?

What's the point of a status page if it goes down too?

https://developers.facebook.com/status/

Also no update yet on the problem. (except for a major spike in api ping times.)

Are their APIs and Sign in with Facebook, also down? That's pretty messed up for all the sites that rely on their Sign in.

This is just one of the reasons you shouldn't build your business on someone else's platform - others include the possibility that they'll charge you for the service later, cut you out of a relationship with your own customers, shut you down for their own reasons, require you to use their services like a store to the exclusion of all others, copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free, squeeze your margins until your business is no longer viable, or simply make your business impossible because of indifference to your requirements.

That the service may be unreliable and it's one more point of failure is just one of the reasons why it's a bad idea to depend on FB (or Twitter, or G+ login) for your logins, and this is why their attempt to subsume the web with corporate corrals will ultimately fail.

I agree with you in principle, however you are ignoring the business value the external auth provides. Specifically there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email, but will login with Facebook.

If you want to take advantage of this market then there are ways to use Login with Facebook without being wholly dependent. Basically if you have full account management, but you allow third-party authentication that ties into that account, especially allowing multiple OAuth providers to be linked to a single of your internal accounts (eg. see how Stack Overflow works), you can significantly mitigate the downside.

The purist and old-school web head and open standards guy in me hates it, but you can't argue with the business case for it.

>there is a large subset of potential users who can not be bothered to sign up for your site via email

There is a simple solution to this. STOP ASKING USERS TO SIGN UP! Do your REALLY need to collect the users e-mail? Do REALLY need them to have an account at all? If you do, then when they register don't ask for their e-mail address if it isn't necessary, or at least make the e-mail address an optional field. Hacker News never asked for my e-mail, because there is no need for them to have it. I probably wouldn't have made an account if it did require an e-mail address.

Sure, it's a trade-off, we probably just disagree about the level of risk involved and the benefits gained.

As you say with FB login there are ways to mitigate that risk, but to take one example - if FB charge for the service in future at 0.01c per use, many of your users will still want to login with FB because it's easier for them, and you'll be stuck with the bill. This happened with sites using google maps in 2012 when they started charging - each of these decisions has to be weighed up individually as a risk, but I think login is too important to delegate to another site and a significant addition of complexity and risk.

It's not one level of risk-reward, you need to take a look at your specific case to make the call. Formulating a blanket opinion about this outside of a specific context is not wise.

That said, your example doesn't demonstrate much risk at all. What are the incentives for FB to start charging for this? It just doesn't make any sense for them to give up that data and that control to try to squeeze existing site operators out of a buck. I mean, never say never, but the risk is much less than it was with Google Maps where you always had to be asking what Google was getting out of this expensive and difficult-to-build-your-own service.

Facebook deleted my personal account and disabled all my fb API keys for releasing an app for Instagram that they claim violates the Instagram tos. The app has nothing to do with Facebook. This was done with no warning.

...apart from them owning Instagram.

It's naive to assume that a company will defend their subsidiary. I am not condoning how they treated you but your assertion of the app has nothing to do with Facebook is incredulous.

What are you talking about? Everyone has to depend on some infrastruture to provide their service. I'd imagine pretty much every hosting platform (from amazon to dreamhost) has less reliability than facebook.

Hosting is fungible and should be easy to change, a reliance on a platform like FB or Twitter say is not.

Also, reliability is one factor out of several, it is not the only, or even the primary, risk with using something like FB login.

Sure, but the more external components you tie in to the bigger the chance that one of them will be down. So you try to keep such dependencies to an absolute minimum otherwise you end up with the joint downtime of all those services.

External dependencies increase failure points, no argue there.

It depends on your line of business, but if you compare the benefits of making user signup faster, lowering acquisition barriers and getting access to the social graph of users against the risks of depending on one of the top infrastructures in the cloud, I think it may well be worth the trouble.

No, that's not how risk works. Centralization of services to a single platform is more risky.

Your risk increases with more moving parts that you introduce into your product. It does not decrease.

Probably you are talking about redundancy where, I agree, it does go down.

You're both right, if you talk about different sorts of risk. There's far more chance that you'll get authentication wrong than Facebook -- and that's a risk. It's probably more likely that your authentication service will go down than Facebook's. But if it's all yours then Facebook has no control over you, so that's one less risk.

As for which risk is the most important risk, well, that's up to your business to decide. But nothing is without risk, all you can do is choose which to expose yourself to.

(S)he's talking about if you rely on an API/Third Party service over hosting.

You can packup your application and move it to Amazon/Rackspace/DigitalOcean, but if you use Facebook login exclusively or use a third party API for a core service and they decide to change (as GP suggests), you're fucked.

As with all other stuff: it depends.

Using it for logins is really questionable. But if you are, for example, building a game for Facebook, it gives you many advantages, so occasional downtime is not really the biggest issue. Let's check the things you wrote about in gaming context:

- charging for the service later TRUE (viral is dead, you pay for the ads to get new players in)

- cut you out of a relationship with your own customer - somewhat FALSE (you can request e-mails from your customers, and have a direct contact afterwards). Even with fan pages, they are not cuting you out, but merely asking to pay to get your message to them

- require you to use their store TRUE, but every other platform does the same

- copy your idea and give it for free. FALSE - Facebook never made a game AFAIK

- squezee you margins. TRUE. I do notice that Cost Per Install for my games is getting higher the more I advertize, and that it suddenly jumped from about $0.15 per install to $0.50 per install a few days ago - about the same time when they switched to the new payment user interface.

"copy your idea and crush you by giving it away for free" - this is a possibility no matter what you do

Sure, but by giving them your users log-ins you are telling them how popular you are so they can sit back and wait until you reach a certain threshold or velocity. Why give a would-be competitor extra information?

If your business is "facebook games", it's rather hard not to build it on Facebook.

If your business is facebook games, about all that happens if you go down is "meh". Is that a good business model?

Probably not.

Maybe it will stay down long enough so sites stop requiring facebook to interact with the site.

I feel you

This is another reason why OAuth should be on a separate subdomain. (First reason is XSS on facebook.com which can grant any permissions to any app.)

Yes.

OAuth dialogs don't load and the graph API is down too.

"Why write your own login? Just use Facebook!" is not looking like sound advice right about now.

Why? Because of 10 minutes of downtime?

It's 25 minutes of downtime now. :)

Apologies, I missed the 'upvote' and hit the 'downvote' instead.

Reason #12,506 not to use an external site for login.

I can tell you my website goes down far more frequently (my fault) than Facebook's does

So now you're down when you make a mistake and when facebook makes a mistake.

there is a bug in your logic. Correct operator is "or".

Programming use of logical operators and regular speech is not compatible. I agree that this is a bug in the English language but this is a forum, not a computer program.

I'm having a bit of trouble finding the maintainer. Possibly OED, but they don't have much in the way of API documentation and I still haven't found the revision history for the source to submit a patch.

Let me know when you find them. Someone removed Þ from the alphabet a few revisions back but I've got a patch to add it back in.

I too would like to deprecate 'or' in favour of 'ior' and 'xor'. Not sure whether A. A. Milne would like it though?

Today's unofficial but fun to pronounce related word is "specificity".

In this case "and" means "in addition to". "when you make a mistake" describes one set of situations, "when facebook makes a mistake" describes another set, and the "and" acts as a union operator. Nothing illogical here, though you might argue that English is ambiguous.

Even if I don't know you I fell pretty confident that is more probable that you are messing up with the login than FB. So the changes of a downtime are lower. The business value it's another topic...

Could not use Connect with Facebook in an iOS app. So their APIs seem to be down as well.

Yeah, it seems to be everything.

Also affects the like buttons across the web, see the error on an old TC article here: http://cl.ly/image/2Q3V1X240D12

Graph API is down: http://graph.facebook.com/zuck/picture

Looks like Facebook website plugins like the comments on TechCrunch are also unavailable.

As a new sysadmin, it brings me comfort that even sites like facebook go down sometimes :)

This happens to everyone. Unfortunately, it's not a good enough excuse when, for example, the corporate sites I run go down.

No application, desktop or web app, is truly bulletproof.

Ok, but some are more than others. Facebook is not famous for its outages, as far as I know.

But they do have a liberal deploy policy which is to deploy all the time and fix issues later. Has bitten them before, but generally considered a good policy.

You are correct as far as I know. Interestingly enough most of the troubles I used to have were with the absurd amounts of JavaScript on their site and failed XHRs--no full outages.

Makes you feel happy you're not working at Facebook now :)

nothing wrong with a challenge !

This is a very interesting event for the world: on a rough estimate, almost half a billion people are displaced right now. Where are all those man-minutes going to, now that facebook is down and they're not facing that iconic blue header bar on their browser?

The downtime will surely end and it'll be back up again for sure, facebook has very smart people behind it, but this event will have served as a very interesting 'accidental' social experiment. Honestly, I'm not that interested on what happened technically, but I'm interested what effect it had socially for the common man outside the techcrunch/HN/reddit/tech bubble.

On-topic: does facebook have a consolidated status page?

What? Displaced? The common man? Reality check, dude.

Nobody is on Facebook constantly. It was down for about 30 minutes, tops. The "common man" just did whatever common men do for all those minutes when they're not on Facebook. Maybe, maybe not, they'll make up the slack later.

Sure, someone was inconvenienced because they relied on being able to find some information or send a message on Facebook and couldn't, but I'll bet far, far more people are inconvenienced on a daily basis in a similar way when their smartphone runs out of battery or is stolen or otherwise lost. Or the network (mobile or fixed line) is down.

I didn't use the word "common man" in an "elitist" context, I used it for avid users, which is a lot of people. Most people inside the tech world underestimate the role of facebook for a person who, all their friends, family and loved ones are using it on a daily basis.

I do agree that a lot of people, if not, everybody will not go crazy or be inconvenienced by a 30-minute downtime, not everyone is on it 24/7. I'm just saying I'm interested on where all those man-minutes went to for avid users.

Probably ringing on their neighbours' door, playing Xbox or having lunch with their family, etc.

I think you underestimate facebook addiction.

We'll probably see a peak in birth rate in 9 months.

Part of it is going to HN, obviously :) (case in point)

Not entirely consolidated, but it's down: https://developers.facebook.com/status/

baby boom in 9 months?

I don't know, maybe ring the neighbours door?

The worlds population is increasing as suddenly people discover relationships in meat space ;-)

Displaced? You probably use it too much. You're very very grossly overestimating the importance of facebook in people's lives.

A good time to test how fast your site loads when the FB JS can't be accessed...

What if they accidentally deleted everything and don't have a backup?

People will start uploading their data to another walled garden.

People will have more privacy than before.

You really think that could happen..

If you mean all accounts + data I think a lot of users will just register again and start over.

If you mean all code it will be the end of Facebook.

But ofcourse this is never going to happen.

Not even possible.

Once you delete something it stays on facebook for like weeks.

They would have to have accidentally blown up everything with a bomb to have the problem you're talking about.

wat?

The don't actually delete your posts, they mark them as deleted. If the government requests your data they get to see everything, even those posts you decided to delete.

I think the above post was referring to Facebook losing their data, by their database actually failing. That would mean the hidden deleted posts are also removed. Of course, they wouldn't have a single database or copy of the data, so this is irrelevant.

As for not deleting data that you request to be deleted, that's normal practice. I know on every site I run, when someone clicks delete, it flags the content and it's hidden, but remains in the database. Deleted data is still valuable data, and it has a wide variety of uses.

Also posts you didn't send. They register every keystroke too!

that escalated quickly.

I'm from China. Facebook is down for me like ... always.

I chuckled

And it's back up. Would be interesting to find out what happened.

seems that lots of pics r not loaded

A lot of the AJAXey stuff isn't working properly either. A comment just took three tries to post.

I guess that bug happened.

The statement most news sites are reporting is:

“Earlier this morning, we experienced an issue that prevented people from posting to Facebook for a brief period of time. We resolved the issue quickly, and we are now back to 100%. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused,”

Maybe they are trying out their new switches. http://gigaom.com/2014/06/18/facebook-has-built-its-own-swit...

Haha, i thought the same. But could also be the NSA sending a message to not publish this. I mean the NSA needs other Service Providers to use the closed source backdoor infested stuff.

Has anyone noticed on the Error page now, copyright is 2013? (http://postimg.org/image/byry6bj9p/)

This and the fact that the help URL is points to the same system, meaning free recursive loop for you.

$2.5b revenue in Q12014. ~$321 revenue per second. A costly outage, no?

drop in the bucket

I would hardly call more than a half a million dollars a "drop in the bucket."

Value is relative. So yes it is in fact a "drop in the bucket".

https://www.prod.facebook.com still works. :)

Time for people to seriously reconsider using all those Facebook plugins and relying on Facebook for user sign in.

Perspective: 1 hours downtime a year is already better than 4 9s

Yes but that is 1 hour downtime added to your own server's downtime.

https://www.prod.facebook.com works for me

Reposting this from my own "Facebook is down" thread because this one has more visibility:

pi@pi ~ $ curl -I http://facebook.com/

HTTP/1.1 503 No server is available for the request

Server: proxygen

Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 07:54:55 GMT Connection: close

Content-Length: 2131

And suddenly the world had no idea what kind of [fruit/turnip/pair of socks] they are.

Today Facebook is potato.

This could just be a coincidence but it seems that Spotify is bugging out, I am able to open the program but it wont play any music. I authenticate with Facebook so maybe that has something to do with it.

Graph API seems down, but part of the API is still up. https://developers.facebook.com/status/

HN: the new Pingdom.

Speaking of pingdom... http://imgur.com/4r3rEGp

I am sorry if this is ever discussed, but could someone tell me why "a site is down" is a big news that we should care about?

It's the second largest site in the world and it is 100% down. Not just a region going down, the entire world.

Moreover, it's not just facebook itself, any site or app that uses signin with facebook or their oauth, nope, that is not working either.

However the main reason, is I don't know if it's ever gone down before. I certainly cannot think of a time.

Like it or hate it the Facebook site isn't just any ordinary site. Combined with the fact that its not just web access that is down, this affects all apps and sites that have Like, Follow, Recommend or Sign In integration.

It's one of the biggest sites in the world so it's a bit different.

Because it's Facebook.

I am sorry if this is ever discussed, but could someone tell me why "a man died" is a big news that we should care about?

It's all about the context, who/what/where/etc.

I got the home page to load once a minute ago (in San Francisco), now back to the standard fail page.

Maybe they switched their network switches to use Wedge with FBOSS and it crashed under load.

Any Postmortem Details available on this issue,So that it can be resourceful to others too

The least they could do is fix the date on the footer. :/ I have an app that shares tweets to Facebook http://2fb.me so don't "LIKE" what's happening

Just me or is it down... again?

It is up for me now, but there are still a lot of bugs. Most likely their database cluster is being partitioned. My newest feed was liked by some of my friends even though I can't see it in my timeline or newsfeeds :)

Wow. As far as I know, this is unprecedented. A worldwide outage.

Follow status updates on Facebook's downtime on http://twitter.com/facebook? #fail

This is the first time I'm seeing FB down. Usually I would just assume my internet connection suck but this time, FB is agreeing that they are down.

Down in Menlo Park, California!

Yeah siddhant i'm ayush I have sucking bsnl wifi but this time its not network problem of India

It will be down until someone sends them a photo back.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/facebook.com

Yes, I can confirm that it is indeed down from here too (Wales, UK). That is a pretty big 'down'.

Like and follow buttons affected too.

Network error on the App.

lol at "down in Wales" making it a pretty big "down"

j/k ;)

Nothing like this ever happens in Wales!

This is the first time I have observed upvotes piling up so fast. It was just 7 points a few minutes back, now it's 70+

Back now. How long was that? Half an hour?

About.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

I took off my wlan cable on and off. It didn't help. Then I stopped the electricity for a moment - I believe in complete cold restarts. Still nothing :)

I wonder what's happening with the stock price, if anybody as any insight that'd be interesting to know.

In related news, productivity highs appear in workplaces around the world...

[Edit] It's down down under as well.

Fortunately, we don't have access to Facebook from work. But unfortunately, Hacker News works :)

Sitting there hitting F5 == productivity?

I wonder how much the facebook devs are freaking out right now trying to fix this!

Is this a first? I can't remember the last time it happened.

Edit: down in France as well.

While it was down, I was noticing an extra 400ms latency in ping responses.

Facebook seems to be back again! Hopefully it stays that way! :)

Looks like the downtime is about to hit the half an hour mark

Great way to make everyone not talk about that Amazon phone!

By my reckoning, this cost them about $600,000+. Ouch.

Has facebook ever put up a post mortem of outages?

All Facebook Login sites are also broken.

*The internet is down.

Facebook like boxes are not working as well.

Deleted comment

Because it is so cool to hate Facebook. You win the negativity award for today.

Just noticed that. Luckily, I used it only a few times a day now to avoid popularity contests.

It's definitely Anonymous and Operation Facebook. A bit late but with success...

any hypotheses on what would have happened ?

Facebook employees, please elaborate... :)

Finally.

best way to find out how many people in HN are active fb users .

Facebook is back up :)

Who cares?

works good here in India.

Down from the moon too.

finaly..

its back now

any guesses why?

Mark has stumbled over a cable.

Back up!

down in italy ...

and from here (UK)

Zimbabwe

Spain

back up for me. 4 min

it's already up!

Down in Kenya

Down in Ghana

It's up.

It's up in Sealand.

Why it was down?

HCMC Vietnam down

It's back up

back up, about 4 min down for me

Down in Italy too.

Down from Australia

Down in South Korea

Down in Egypt

Lithuania too

Down from China, too

Make scene :)

Now up here in Nepal

and Germany. First major outage, no?

UK can confirm

Facebook is up

down in papua new guinea (south pacific)

Can't wait what Google+ has to say.

Down in Vietnam

What happened??

Up now in Italy

Down from London as well

Working again, in the UK at least 09:24 BST

Down in Belgium.

Uups, sorry my fault... pressed the pause key

Down in Frankfurt

Down in Hong Kong as well.

Back up for me in Orlando.

And it is UP!

Down in Dubai, UAE

Down in India too.

Seems like a major screw up.

It is down from here Nepal too.

down from France

Yep, down here in Los Angeles, CA

It's up for me now!! (India)

...and they're back.

hahah ! No, still the error page

And we are back (Belgium)

Well it's back again here in the UK.

It's down, here in Mexico

Its working for me now! (India)

Down here in Sweden, close to the EU datacentre.

Can confirm. Down in Sweden too.

What happened its not working ~from Raipur India

Confirmed down in Dubai (via friend).

So I can code without disruption now lol

Down from China ... nah it's not new

It sounds like the prophecy ! We all are going to die OMGOMGOMG

Seems to be going up and down from belgium

Definitely news worthy, pretty much like a 'first post!' post.

One of the most popular websites in the world (that over 1/7th of the worlds population use) going down is newsworthy.

No one is ever going to see this post, but... no, it isn't. All sites experience downtime occasionally. Unless it is for some interesting technical reason or it is extended beyond a couple of hours, there is nothing newsworthy about it whatsoever. There is certainly nothing that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity about it.

Its a Marketing Stunt..

Down from Singapore too. At first, I thought they had finally blocked facebook at work.

Definitely down http://cl.ly/W9Vm

http://prntscr.com/3ubefw

Its a Marketing stunt...

Same at Turkey. http://webrazzi.com/2014/06/19/facebook-teknik-bir-problem-y...

Actually looks like that; I am getting the following message:

Sorry, Something went wrong.

We're working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

Go Back

Edit - This is India reporting.

Same from japan

Holy shit, I caught Facebook when it was down!!! Yeah!!!

Yeah Fb is down is most important event in the world now than poverty and hunger. Priorities.

Thanks for downvote. I am honored.

Facebook shows off its DIY Networking Gear. Facebook goes down.

Coincidence?

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/06/18/facebook-shows-off-it...

Deleted comment

This video is gonna get a few views today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpNNa_Mokok

Dont rely on movie, most of it is bullshit

Your'e right, and I didn't do that, the book Accidental Billionares mentioned that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to agrees to having such a conversation with Mr. Saverin

How many submissions do we need on this topic?

Maybe I'm jaded because I don't really "get" the whole social network phenomena, but honestly, who really cares anyway? Productivity will (briefly) go up; a few people dependant on FB SSO's wont be able to log into some other pointless services and the internet will continue to function.

I normally down vote people when they say "what does xyz have to do with HN?", but 3 submissions commenting on a procrastination portal being down is really scraping the barrel.

[edit]

I see the submissions have now been consolidated. That makes much more sense. Good work HN admins :)

If you Google for "www" the first result is Facebook.

For many people, Facebook is how they interact with the web. It's their primary portal for talking with their friends, sharing photos, sending messages, and catching up on news stories.

Calling it a "social network" is like calling Google only a search engine. It's way, way more. And this outage is completely unprecedented. Can you recall a previous time that Facebook has been down? I can't.

I can. Though I do agree that their uptime is amongst the best.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that nobody should care about Facebook being down, and that "a few people" depend on Facebook's SSO.

This has a major impact on a lot of sites, and there are millions of people that do care about Facebook.

It is worthy of a HN submission, although I personally care most about the postmortem to find out what went wrong.

My complaint was actually about the number of submissions rather than it being submitted or that people shouldn't care.

Ok if that was the case, I understand the sentiment, but the words you chose to make that point were badly chosen.

Yeah, very true. I did launch into quite an inflammatory rant.

- "who really cares anyway"

Imagine how many people are locked out of thousands of websites where the only way to sign in and check your order or something is by using Facebook login, which is not working.

I get the same sentiment... who cares... apparently a lot of people if this story can attain over 100 upvotes within 15 minutes.

It will be interesting to read postmortem but as far as "is down" stories go, they should be just auto-deleted from HN

People are excited, since this is one of the core missions and thinking in facebook - never be down, or people will go elsewhere. That's why it's a big deal, not everyday something goes that wrong, especially in something you put a lot efforts in.

Where will the people go? An engineer from Bloomberg was telling me once about their infrastructure, how fault tolerant and highly available it is, they have redundancy everywhere, including power from two different power plants. He said if they were down for few minutes they would be out of business - users of their trading platform would switch to Reuters very quickly. But where will Facebook users go if the site is down for a day? I'm genuinely curious.

It's more of an idea, that if you are not good, people will eventually find better service. Right now, they really can go elsewhere (if you not count bashing on twitter :)), but imagine that facebook downtimes become a norm - eventually there will be a better service.

I also do not use face book and think it is silly. However I think the event is a little interesting. There are thousands of apps that don't even function with out face book.

Many of us who read Hacker News are employed in the technology industry and have a particular interest in reliability and availability of computer systems. It's not interesting that people can't post their personality quizzes, but it is very interesting that Facebook had a production outage, particularly if we are able to learn something from the failure that we can apply to future scenarios we may encounter.

Personally, I use social networks to boost productivity. Facebook is a good management tool for different groups. I have used it to manage people for the last 4 years and it has been the best platform for me to reach everyone. Sad, but true.

I don't understand why people are downvoting this. It's his way, if you dislike, it's not a reason enough to downvote.

It's interesting to HN when any high scalability, high availability service is down.

It's more that they have one of the best records for reliability. Last time they went down was how many years ago? Most sites go down once a month for a few minutes.

Facebook was down? That's fantastic! Hopefully people looked up from their devices and: a) listened to birdsong b) amazed at flowers and plants c) initiated a conversation with someone in physical proximity d) enjoyed what was going on instead of trying to snap a photo of it for facebook e) all of the above or f) kept hitting "reload"...

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