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Comment by djacobs | Hacker News Reader

I restarted my modem and router two times before I realized that the network was fine and that it was just Facebook that was down. Props to their ops team for uptime that is so reliable.

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I haven't seen Facebook go down in years. I wonder if this is going to be a big deal.

I'm wondering how much revenue gets lost every minute that Facebook is down. It has to be in the tens of thousands.

Edit: someone wrote this below in the comments, which came to $400 per second of downtime. Ouch.

$400 per second somehow seems... smaller than I would have thought. Their opex on a per second basis has got to be orders of magnitude higher than that.

$400 per second is about $13 billion per year

For comparison, the cost of downtime for a single oil rig is on the order of $100 per second. Petrobras, as an example, operates 70 rigs and has a market cap of $125 billion. Facebook has a market cap of $216 billion.

(source for cost: Cormorant Alpha shutdown in 2013)

Edit: misplaced parenthesis => my first number was way off, $70 000 vs $100. Redid analysis, made mental note not to do math before coffee intake.

That seems a tad... high.

$70,000 = $2 trillion a year, assuming 24/365 usage.

Total value of all oil produced in the world (assuming $50/barrel) is roughly $1.4 trillion a year.

You're off by an order of magnitude, 70 * 100 = $7,000, not $70,000.

http://www.offshoreenergytoday.com/cormorant-alpha-shutdown-... estimates that the Cormorant Alpha shutdown cost $10,000,000/day, or about $100/second. That figure comes from multiplying the oil production (90,000 barrels/day) by the oil price ($110/barrel). Where did you get the $70,000/second figure from?

Gah, misplaced a parenthesis. You are correct. I shouldn't do math before I've had coffee.

Facebook went down less than a year ago for a couple hours.

Restarting your modem is step 1 in troubleshooting internet connectivity problems when Facebook is down?

It wasn't stated that that was the first thing he tried. I've experienced router/modem issues where only certain sites were inaccessible until one or both pieces of equipment were restarted. I'd be interested in knowing exactly what happens to a router's software to make that happen.

I'd spitball a guess that it has to do with the firewall rules on the modem or router running themselves into a bad state. That would explain why a restart fixes it, since the state would be cleared.

That can be caused by a variety of issues. From the top of my head, I would investigate broken DNS caches and incorrect MTU settings.

It's almost like he mentioned it because he realized it was silly after the fact and wanted to share that bit of mirth with us.

Or Facebook is just that important. We will never know for sure.

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