With Facebook products, you see outages in December and May. Why? Those are the last few weeks to complete your project before your performance review. Miss this window and you find yourself in career trouble. Facebook employees put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves during these months.
I would not be surprised if this outage was caused by a bad pull request related to a new project.
“Diff”, not PR.
What happens if you don’t? You get fired or put on a PIP?
People will very often see it as "service x with fb login is broken"
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/CenturyLink+Outage+Causing...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/centurylink-outage-led-to-a-3-...
Any info on what network/operator/operator/etc is suffering the issue? (just so people know about it if it's public, i don't see anything on HN at least)
Thanks, and good luck!
https://news.ucar.edu/132771/new-sunspot-cycle-could-be-one-...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/solar-cycle-25-is-here-na...
The sun is awakening with ‘solar storms’ that could affect Earth - https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/08/solar-stor...
A Powerful Solar Flare Produces Bright Northern Lights This Week - https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2020/12/09/a-powerful-...
I recognize a fellow BOFH...
It has been surprisingly slow to get a fix or an update.
Based on the description of the outage (issues serving new ads to Messenger), it reads like the latter.
> We are currently investigating an issue where creating new ads with app_destination as MESSENGER results in the following error ...
Admittedly if it does have significant revenue impact, I'm surprised that change hasn't been rolled back or otherwise mitigated in the week+ that the incident's been open. Or maybe it has, and nobody remembered to close the incident.
- The thought of 'ads' in a private messaging app repulses me. I don't use any of these three apps. Mostly since they all require you hand over your mobile phone number. Which then becomes a very powerful 'foreign key'/unique identifier to so many other third or fourth-party marketing databases which might also have it.
edit - reports of Instagram and Whatsapp being affected too:
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/10/outages-reported-across...
Signal experience isn't that good. Alien from the platform they run on. For example, no system recommendations to send this person a message or share something with them through signal.. Telegram is more a platform native and integrated into the system.
Also there is the issue of messages arriving late (not minutes but hours late, sometimes days late)
Signal is honestly fantastic as a SMS-replacement app. It sends Signal messages to contacts with Signal and normal SMS to contacts without (Telegram might do the same thing, being able to set it as your default SMS app, I'm not sure).
Back in the old days I was in the registry daily.
Wire is also a good contender but they seem to have found that if you don't sell user data, there is little money to be made from personal accounts and are focusing more on business accounts. You can still register and use it as an individual, though (and I continue to do so). It has more features than Signal and isn't funded by Facebook so that's a plus, but the UX is slightly worse than Signal.
Makes you wonder what Telegram is going to make money with though. It's a huge liability for me, just so damn convenient... Need to find a better alternative.
Also, telegram isn’t private either afaik.
In terms of contact info.. I kind of like knowing who I’m talking with
I would say "why not Matrix?".
this is the current problem i have with chat. there are too many options.
On the flip side, it's not very customizable and doesn't have a lot of the more "modern" UX goodies like emoji reactions or threads. But it's overall very good and I see no reason to change.
If you wonder why I think they may geoblock European users, it's mostly because that's how many American companies are dealing with GDPR (especially retail businesses, but also major media outlets).
Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.
Never say never and all that...but it's not like past precedence has shown us the courts are trigger happy when it comes to breaking up monopolies.
Would love one if someone has them... daron@hey.com
Watching even a short video isn't the same experience as rapidly scrolling through a gallery of pictures
I am so looking at VR in the near future but crap like this rules certain products right out.
The internet appears to be imploding this morning.
But Telegram still seems to be most popular second choice after Messenger and/or WhatsApp - I've seen recently two people joining it out of sudden (perhaps messenger gained traction because of Belarus situation); personally that's my default instant messenger nowadays, while Signal is the backup one. I'd like to move everyone to element/matrix but that's rather impossible to achieve...
Literally in the headline. (unless it's been edited)
99% of all the ones I care about to be honest.
Maybe it's a function of me being an eastern-european expat living in London, but almost every here (Europe) uses WhatsApp.
Edit: looks like I was wrong. I'm in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands and our neighbouring countries, Whatsapp is ubiquitous, so I presumed the rest of Europe was the same. I guess this proves that assumption is the mother of all failures.
She probably doesn't know what an SMS is (those are those things her bank sends her, right?).
WhatsApp new version updates gets prime time News spot in even prominent, respected News channel.
Social structures are being built on WhatsApp here, Relatives get offended when you don't join their WhatsApp groups, people don't believe when you say that you don't use WhatsApp, Package disptach details from eCommerce arrive through WhatsApp(no permissions asked) and of course spam arrives through WhatsApp(Local shops wish for your birthday because you signed up for that damn discount card 10 years ago).
Essentially no-one as we've all stopped trading actual phone numbers years ago.
I've always been a fan of distributed resiliency but when it comes to basic communications, I don't have the time or motivation to hunt down the service and method of communication within that service some person chooses to use. I much prefer ubiquitous communication, at least from a user interaction stand-point.
Older messenger applications often supported handfuls to dozens of popular communication systems so you could interact with one touch point/interface, and coukd still benefit from the fact the marketplace was forcing some competition while your communication wouldn't be strangled by some single private entity's policies or actions.
I can find a legal solution to your technical blockades. Be careful what you ask for.
legislative... senator.
Some folks in congress are savvy about technology however, such as Wyden.
Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...
What was the argument there? It's not like that's solving the halting problem.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe facebook here, but I don't understand how they are contradicting themselves here.
That doesn't make any sense to me. I would expect different applications from the same company to share the same underlying infrastructure. Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.
So, I get you here and what you're saying. But companies at this scale argue they're "independently managed" or whatever.
With that context, for Facebook, there's really no way of saying that these 3 different brands are independent when it comes down to it.
It'd be much like Procter & Gamble saying their 100s of brands were all really different institutional entities.
This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
In this case integration between services is a pretty strong defense against this. Facebook can argue that consolidating the infrastructure allows them to deliver each product at a lower cost and/or higher quality than if it was served independently.
If the court accepted those facts, then Facebook would have a ironclad argument against being broken up under the consumer welfare standard.
> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.
- FTC Approved these as as legitimate acquisitions
- Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years
- Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook
>Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook
Then why did Facebook buy Instagram, instead whipping up some python code on their own if it's so easy?
I would conclude they bought them to be anti-competitive.
FYI that's exactly what they did when they broke up Ma Bell into the 7 RBOC's. Same company, same massive infrastructure. They owned everything and the government was still able to break them up.
Mark Zuckerberg Inside "Fak how many advertisement money and user data we lost due to this outage."
