Facebook is down (09:08AM PDT Aug 1, 2014) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is down (09:08AM PDT Aug 1, 2014)

facebook.com

131 pointskiyoto90 comments

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For what it's worth, stock is down too:

http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/charts?symbol=US:...

As is the NASDAQ

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

allll red.

Facebook beta is still up: https://beta.facebook.com/

That's an interesting link!

Never knew they had a beta site - but I can't see anything different. Is there a list of differences somewhere?

Anybody notice their IPV6 address?

2a03:2880:2110:df07:face:b00c

They do have interesting infrastructure v6 prefixes too.

>> snip <<

   5  be2.bb01.iad3.tfbnw.net (2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::6b8)  37.323 ms  37.332 ms  37.326 ms
   6  be13.bb02.frc3.tfbnw.net (2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::16c0)  37.669 ms  27.980 ms  27.878 ms
   7  ae61.dr02.frc3.tfbnw.net (2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::653)  27.525 ms  25.989 ms  25.871 ms
   8  po1022.csw07c.frc3.tfbnw.net (2620:0:1cff:dead:beef::1b75)  26.741 ms  27.965 ms  27.875 ms
   9  * * *
   10  edge-star6-shv-07-frc3.facebook.com  (2a03:2880:2130:7f07:face:b00c:0:1)  25.823 ms  24.916 ms  24.799 ms

In an oddly fortunate coincidence, I switched PortableApps.com to using custom static social sharing buttons yesterday afternoon to speed the site up. It's worked very well.

The only tradeoff is losing the Facebook like button (which is kind of useless on web pages these days anyway) and the like/tweet counts. The upside is lightning-fast loading (just image links) as well as increased privacy for your visitors. The buttons use a single Javascript function to bring up a centered window about the size of the standard social sharing widgets using the sharing URL so the functionality is about the same.

It isn't an entirely new idea as I've seen a few different writeups on it online. My solution is based on ideas from a few different online sources as well as my own custom images and tweaks. I'm planning on implementing it as a standard Drupal module posted on Drupal.org for my own sites and including options for faded and grayscale buttons to better blend with alternate themes and not grab too much attention from content. I could probably put together a quick set of code and throw it on Github as well if people are interested in just using the raw code or working up a WordPress module for it.

And all the companies that decided to rely on Facebook Login for their website take a breath and think 'oh fuuudge'.

Hahah, indeed! Same goes for FB APIs. But it applies to anybody who uses third-party APIs, no biggie.

Yup, Tinder is not working for me.

Has it ever? ;)

After Facebook took down the Internet last time, they updated all of the script snippets that they have and added an "async" attribute to them. The functionality is still missing when FB goes down, but the site you're looking at still loads quickly.

I switched all of my social sharing widgets to static image buttons that bring up simple sharing windows just yesterday. My site loads so much faster and is completely unaffected by Facebook being down as a result.

Plus, you're protecting your visitors' privacy by not leaking to Facebook/Twitter/etc. that they visited your site. Thanks for doing this!

Exactly. It decreases your overall footprint online, but you can still have access to it if you want it. I did a short note to our users here: http://portableapps.com/node/42106

I made a post elsewhere in this thread about it but it was downvoted. I'm thinking about packaging it up as a Drupal extension (what I run) as well as a raw package on github in the hopes that someone will be interested in doing a WordPress extension as well. There are a few posts about doing this online, but none tried to fully mimic the convenience and look of the standard buttons, so I thought folks might be interested.

That applies to their social like/share buttons, but it doesn't apply to sites that use Login with Facebook functionality whose users were unable to login for 40 minutes.

When I submitted http://www.facebook.com, it redirected me back to the previous outage link because the URL is the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914905

I added a random URL string to have HN recognize this as a new entry. Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?

Definitely sounds like a good idea. Man, there are so many improvements I wish HN would make, but everytime I see a good idea, it gets completely ignored, downvoted into oblivion, or removed by the mods.

> Perhaps it's a good idea to allow re-posting the same link for certain URLs so that "XYZ is down/having issues" type posts aren't deemed as duplicates?

It would be a much much better idea if people stopped posting "X IS DOWN!!!!" submissions.

I agree that it is not the most intellectually interesting. But HN, for better and worse, has evolved to be one of the front pages of the Internet (at least for certain demographics), and some people do come here for transient, immediate information. In that sense, I don't think it is entirely useless.

Also, sometimes "X is down" type of submissions can start conversations interesting in their own right in the comment section.

Maybe they should be limited to a single account? Currently there are at least eight threads about FB.

And isn't the interesting discussion during the post-mortem?

I mostly agree, but I find it vaguely interesting that a service as large and distributed can still have a "down for significant numbers of people"-type event.

How necessary are those posts though? A link to a site that is down is practically useless. A link to a blog post about the current status or a post mortem is very useful.

According to the HN guidelines[0], it seems that it would be more appropriate to write a blog entry regarding the outage and link to that, rather than to link to the site experiencing the outage at the time. Providing a link to a non-functional site is itself of no value, after all.

Also, while not stated in the guidelines, I imagine a text submission would also be appropriate for this sort of situation.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Increased errors/latency on all Platform surfaces" https://developers.facebook.com/status/

Now the status page is down too! Awesome

It's intermittent, try reloading.

I think it's fully down now.

Seems to be consistently back up.

Typical this happens when I'm pushing fixes to our facebook integration app a friday evening. First I thought it was me hitting request throttling limits...

As someone who doesn't use Facebook I'm always fascinated by these threads because they show how much some people depend on Facebook (or at least addicted to it).

It probably broke a lot of websites people were working on, that's the only reason I noticed it.

Some websites, unfortunately for them, decided to forgo traditional logins and rely entirely on Facebook for user logins. As a result, they've been down the last 20 minutes.

It's a business concern for a lot of us, and not only those of us using OAuth as an option for login. We use facebook pretty heavily for marketing and advertising.

Facebook has nearly 10% of the global population as monthly active users. You're surprised that people are dependant on it?

I bet you also don't even own a TV.

I bet you also don't even own a TV.

That's true. I got rid of TV five years ago.

You're surprised that people are dependant on it?

Fascinated, not surprised.

From the developers page:

21 minutes ago Increased errors/latency on all Platform surfaces

Facebook is currently experiencing an issue that is affecting all API and web surfaces. Our engineers detected the issue quickly and are working to resolve it ASAP. We'll update shortly.

Time to go for a nice long walk to the lake. This unscheduled get-up-and-move break brought to you by Facebook. Thanks!

I've been trying to check on several advertising campaigns and add a new one to no avail. Nothing to do but wait (or work on other stuff).

Maybe it's another experiment to see what type of stuff we post after an outage.

Funny that this is how I find out fb's ipv6 has their name in it (pinging their url)... :)

2a03:2880:2040:7f01:face:b00c:0:1

You should try my Chrome extension; it makes IP addresses easily discoverable:

https://ipvfoo.googlecode.com/

I just noticed it too: http://veb.co.nz/cloud/public.php?service=files&t=ce5fc7ac6a...

Note: I'm in New Zealand, and I still can't access it.

Sorry about the screenshot I still haven't figured out how to share images directly via ownCloud.

..and US productivity is up...

except for HN where the post is #1 right now. This is beyond my understanding. What is it about a FB service outage that makes it so important?

(this is not an attempt to troll, it's a serious question)

Quite nearly a billion daily active users, for a start.

facebook is a huge tech company much on the scale of google. People are curious because it's like watching Goliath trip himself and fall down.

As others have mentioned in this post, Facebook is used as a log in for many other websites and services. Whatever your personal feeling is about Facebook, it's an integral aspect of user interaction with websites far outside of its native social network platform. For this reason, the condescending guffaws are out of place.

thanks for the reply. I indeed had not considered the login-aspect of it. I'm not working in the website/online service business (and neither do I use facebook) so this helps me understand better.

For the rest, I added a clear note.

> What is it about a FB service outage that makes it so important?

829 million daily active users on average in June 2014

Earth population, 7.046 billion (2012)

They have a LOT of users. Any platform supporting that traffic is interesting to see how it fails.

Well for me it's my #1 way of communicating with people. More then email, more than phone. Even job related stuff I've head group message threads open where my and the people I'm working with are uploading .zips of the latest work etc.. Note this is FB's messaging feature, not their "News Feed/Status update" feature.

Sure there are alternatives but it's what I've been using.

If you count F5 usage and posting to Twitter about how Facebook is down to be productive, sure.

http://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/495249974377340928

We can neither confirm nor deny that #Anonymous had anything to do with #Facebook disruption today, nothing to see here ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

it would be interesting know the technical reasons.

AFAIK they are changing the way 3rd party applications are integrated with FB, using a special set of user IDs for each app, and other privacy related changes which will limit the amount of user information apps get. It's a completely new system and probably tested on smaller user base than the entire FB. My guess is that it went into production worldwide today.

You are right on the money with regards to the changes, but the timeline is a bit off. All FB apps created after April 30 automatically get all the new stuff (whether they want it or not). Existing apps have April 2015 to switch to the new system. So, the outage is probably unrelated to to the new stuff.

Source: I'm a FB app developer who is seriously affected by the Login and Graph API 2.0 changes.

Down in Germany. The developer status page is down for me too

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

Its amazing that the world is still turning even when Facebook is down. Hmm...

I noticed that I had trouble logging on yesterday around 4pm. I wonder what's going on.

The world has a lot of momentum. Give it time.

If I hadn't seen this submission I wouldn't have even noticed it.

> Its amazing that the world is still turning even when Facebook is down. Hmm...

I had to switch to LINE to continue a chat I had going on with a friend. Highly disruptive to my workflow.

Maybe it won't come back up

A man can dream.

https://i.imgur.com/984NIEs.png

Offtopic, but what's that Chrome theme? It looks really nice and clean.

It's back up: 12:23 EDT

Nope. Still down at 12:28pm EST. I think they managed to get some regions working for a bit. And the beta site is working. But it still just shows the error page for me here on Time Warner Cable in NYC. Not too concerned as I don't use Facebook for anything critical.

Back down for me in Toronto. 12:37 EDT

Edit: Back up (again) at 12:54 EDT

It's a huge pet peeve of mine when people use EST when we're in daylight savings time. This, presumably, should be 12:23 EDT. Also, it's not back up.

The existence of daily savings time - and time zones - is a huge pet peeve for me.

Sure, me too. However, using the incorrect abbreviation (and thereby referencing incorrect timestamps) is certainly not going to have any positive effects on the situation.

Sorry, like many I barely recognize daylight savings. But this is super off-topic now.

Looks like the service is coming back online now. Every other request works at this point.

Facebook is up. They did not mention anything on their Twitter page.

Sorry, something went wrong.

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

Definitely down for me. Good thing I don't have a FB account.

VKontakte (Russian facebook) was down a couple of days ago...

It's back up now as of 09:22AM PDT. 14 minute downtime.

Oh! Thank God!

Please don't use facebook. it is bad for you.

WW3 imminent.

something went reary wrong

same in bulgaria

Fixing,improving,adding or just it was hacked????

FB is fixing, adding,improving or just it was hacked???

This affects germany as well...

It is still down for me as well.

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