
Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage - ajiang
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2019/03/13/facebook-instagram-go-down-across-united-states-apparent-outage/3151883002/
======
wybiral
Can you imagine if Twitter and Google went down at the same time?

People would be reactivating their Facebook accounts and having to sift
through conspiracy theory posts about Hillary Clinton still just to figure out
what was going on.

Edit: The points on this post keep going up and down every time I check these
comments. Yes, it was sarcasm, I was joking, but I was trying to point out
that most people rely on a small set of services. "Cloud" has centralized
things a lot.

~~~
josteink
> Can you imagine if Twitter and Google went down at the same time?

Google sure, but what people in the real world cares about twitter?

Twitter could be down for days and only the technocracy would notice.

~~~
corobo
Twitter is where we complain that Google is down

------
linsomniac
Could this be related to the storm?

I was out shoveling, and came back in to my phone blowing up. Our systems at
IronMountain (formerly Fortrust) in Denver all rebooted at once. These are all
on redundant power, each systems redundant power supplies connecting to
different circuits entering the cabinet, and those two circuits fed from 3
PDUs (two separate, one share). Each of those is supposed to be fed by a
separate UPS and generator. Last status update I had says that they are
running off generators, but they've been shockingly tight-lipped about it.

Don't get me wrong, it was hi-LAR-ious to call into their NOC and have them
pretend that I was the only one having problems. "Can you tell me if there is
a major data center outage going on?" "We are trying to gather information, we
are making a bunch of client phone calls, we will know after we make those
calls." "... Why are you making a bunch of client calls if you aren't having
an outage?"

~~~
erobbins
No, FB datacenters are geographically diverse.

They do run quarterly 'storms' where a datacenter is shut down to test
failover and resiliency. I have no idea if today is one of those days, since I
left last year.

~~~
chipperyman573
Interesting. Out of curiosity, how hard is it to turn the datacenter "back on"
in case they discover there's a problem with the failover?

~~~
londons_explore
Typically that could be done with one undrain command and take about 30
seconds.

------
40acres
I'm interviewing for a Production Engineer role at Facebook on Monday, thanks
for providing relevant "do you have any questions for us" content.

~~~
mtw
Good question is why oh why switch WhatsApp to Facebook tech when it was
running perfectly ok on its own. Never crashed.

~~~
duado
So that engineers can be moved between product groups while carrying relevant
knowledge and experience with them.

~~~
macintux
If that’s the goal, why not start incorporating more Erlang into the rest of
Facebook instead? It proved its mettle at WhatsApp.

~~~
duado
Facebook has to hire thousands of engineers per year. They may incorporate
more Erlang into Facebook, but they have to have a core tech stack that can
easily onboard engineers from a variety of backgrounds. I don't have the
foggiest idea of whether Erlang can be part of that or not, but people talk
about it as if it's a special-purpose tool.

------
snazz
I’ve seen many systems go down over the last few days worldwide. Aside from
the possibility of a mega-DDoS attack (which Facebook denies), all of these
organizations have fairly diverse tech stacks to my knowledge. Google’s issue
(supposedly) had to do with their Blobstore API, we don’t know what happened
with Facebook, and many other, smaller services have had issues as well,
including three intranet services at my workplace.

This leaves me wondering what software all these places have in common. The
application layers are all different, the databases are all different, the
containerization and provisioning systems are different, but I imagine that
all these systems rely on two things: the global Internet backbone, and maybe
the Linux kernel.

Have there been major security vulnerabilities patched lately in the Linux
kernel that could have had unintended consequences?

~~~
shafte
The best explanation is coincidence, I think. I have direct knowledge of two
of the incidents in the past few weeks, and they have completely unrelated
causes.

Sometimes you just get unlucky!

~~~
smacktoward
"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy
action."

\-- Ian Fleming (in _Goldfinger_ )

------
Implicated
Facebook's own status dashboard
([https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/))
showed no issues or outtage just 30 min ago.

I run a messenger bot platform - the webhooks stopped being delivered _hours_
ago... nothing on their status page until it had been down for hours.

Their current issue...

"We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API requests to take
longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue and working on a
resolution."

What? lmao

~~~
buboard
you get what you pay for

~~~
knicholes
If you're inferring that Facebook is "free," I'd strongly disagree. Data is
the currency of today, and they're swimming in it.

~~~
buboard
fb platform is free

~~~
marnett
Facebook is a paid advertising platform. There are plenty of people not
getting what they paid for as a result of an outage.

~~~
buboard
ok but you are all talking about the users. facebook platform is free to use
for developers

as for the advertisers, i doubt they 'll be charged for impressions that
didn't happen

~~~
evasote
But for someone who runs a business that relies on Instagram for marketing,
and pays for advertising on that platform, it's a bit scary when the whole
thing is down. Obviously this was only temporary this morning, and sure, no
charges while down, but doesn't do me much good...

------
cronix
It looks like something much larger is going on. If you look at the front page
of [https://downdetector.com/](https://downdetector.com/) you'll see most
major sites/backbones are having issues
(Verizon/ATT/Sprint/CenturyLink/TMobile/Comcast/Level3/etc).

~~~
ceejayoz
That site relies on user reports.

I strongly suspect users are reporting "my Internet is having troubles"
because their FB, Messenger, etc. isn't working right.

For example, in the comments of the T-Mobile outage page, there's stuff like
"Haven't been able to upload anything to social media all day" and "Cannot
send pictures through whatsapp and fb messenger".

~~~
cronix
That's true, but it is a good indicator. Here's a better map from Akamai:
[https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-
akamai/re...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-akamai/real-
time-web-monitor.jsp)

Also, check out the "Attacks" tab. That one really lights up. Like _seriously_
lights up. Something is going on... all over. US, China, Russia, EU...

~~~
ceejayoz
The attacks tab says the current count is "100% Below normal". It does not
support what you think it supports.

It "lights up" because there are always attacks happening.

~~~
cronix
Look at the scale. The blue area is 100% below normal. The red are way above
normal.

~~~
ceejayoz
That doesn't make any sense, given that the "traffic" tab's scale says "7%
above normal".

The red are the areas with the most attacks, and as you'd expect, they
correspond to large population centers. (It's also not very granular, and
appears to largely correspond to "where does Akamai have a datacenter".)

~~~
snazz
It’s a poorly designed graphic that’s hard to get any real info from.

------
jedberg
So yesterday Google had a major (and out of character) outage across its apps,
and today Facebook has a major (and also out of character) outage across its
apps.

I can't wait to see the RCA for both of these and if they're related.

~~~
godzillabrennus
Private post Morten: The NSA middleware we are required to run (that took time
to deploy to each of our social partners) is breaking something so let’s
revert.

Public post Mortem:

Entirely believable technical cause.

~~~
popz41
I imagine the NSA uses an optical tap device. These devices create identical
copies and require no power or management.

~~~
cronix
That's why it's called PRISM. It's exactly what you describe. Splitting an
optical signal into 2 using, basically, a prism. One signal goes out to the
net as normal, the other goes to their own datacenters, that they keep
continually building and expanding. The newer ones are being build _on_
military bases, for added security. Check em out. Look at the size and cost of
them. Some are over a million sq. ft. That's a lot of data. They measure it in
terms of zottabytes and zettabytes (in 2013, a lifetime ago in terms of
storage space):

[https://modernsurvivalblog.com/government-gone-wild/nsa-
loca...](https://modernsurvivalblog.com/government-gone-wild/nsa-locations-in-
the-united-states/)

[http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-
centers/](http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/)

~~~
sterlind
Nah, PRISM referred to the front door for lawful access to customer records
under warrant. That's the sort of portal that China once hacked Gmail by
gaining access to.. the companies explicitly built those access relays.

The beam splitter stuff (e.g. Room 641A) went by different codenames,
TRAFFICTHIEF and TURMOIL iirc. That's the back door.

------
CodeWriter23
This is bigger than Facebook.

[https://imgur.com/a/gePwi0i](https://imgur.com/a/gePwi0i)

[https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-
akamai/re...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-akamai/real-
time-web-monitor.jsp)

~~~
ce4
The heavy traffic is due to sports events - champions league last-16 matchday
live streaming: Bayern Munich vs. Liverpool, FC Barcelona vs Olympique Lyon.
The heatmap matches the clubs' home countries UK, Germany, France & Spain
quite well.

Dont conflate that with fb/insta problems.

~~~
why-el
Indeed. The games are streamed like crazy! Lots of streams are in HD.

~~~
ce4
Yep, the actual bandwidth consumption is mindblowing :)

~~~
pferde
Multicast was designed exactly for this - same data streamed to many endpoints
at the same time. Too bad it's not being more widely used, the bandwidth
savings would likely be huge.

------
FabHK
Let's see whether we have a spike in the birth rate in 9 months.

(Oh, turns out the Great Blackout Baby Boom was a myth:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-
maternity/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-maternity/) )

~~~
Arbalest
What if there is a fall in birthrate because people can't organise risky
hookups without their preferred communication platform?

~~~
anitil
Or a fall in STDs for the same reason.

------
kartan
"This usually means we're making an improvement to the database your account
is stored on. While this process won't affect your account, you temporarily
won't be able to access the site."
[https://www.facebook.com/help/134401680031995](https://www.facebook.com/help/134401680031995)

I guess that this is all that I will get. Facebook is never down, it is just
making improvements (like restarting the services to make them work again).

~~~
jfaat
We've always been at way with Eastasia

~~~
subcosmos
and autocorrect - it's doubleplus bad

~~~
T_D_K
*ungood

~~~
apolloWBrazil
They could be consolidating all of the DB infrastructure for their platforms.
A zero down time dial-up would not be possible as they would need to nearly
double their DB infrastructure. Short planned temporary outages of various
features probably become long unplanned cross-platform outages. They probably
decided to not rollback the migration after the first outage.

------
earless1
What manner of failure would cause such globally deployed and distributed
systems to go down like this? I'm very interested to read up on this when they
release details of the failure.

~~~
rwultsch
Short duration: network, bad software deploy Long duration: db. If you break
data, it takes a while to unbreak.

Source: Me. My career has been spent managing db's for internet scale sites.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I work for a smaller but comparably large platform. "If everything is down
check the DB" is at the top of one of our internal monitoring websites in red.

Screw ups related to data loss are rare (I've been here years and haven't seen
one with the DBs that the stuff I work with uses) but failures at this scale
tend to cascade a little ways and it takes time to dig out of the hole. They
probably have the problem solved but they have to spend a bunch of time
synchronizing things and verifying the fix before they press the big red "go
live" button.

~~~
pferde
Shouldn't the monitoring websites be able to check the DB status for you
before you even look at that red text? :)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
We have a different dedicated page that gives an overviews of what's going on
with the DB. The page in question is supposed to be a single stop that lets
you visually get an overview of the state of the application servers and
whether things are "normal" and if not allow you to quickly identify what is
not normal.

------
agosnell
If you use their API and haven't seen it yet, their issue is listed here on
their status page:

[https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/55989644784543...](https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/559896447845433/)

~~~
odomojuli
Looks like the status page is down for me as well.

~~~
yorwba
Increased Error Rates Created by Gary Fitzpatrick · · Facebook Team — Today at
10:32 AM

Current State: Investigating

Description: We are currently experiencing issues that may cause some API
requests to take longer or fail unexpectedly. We are investigating the issue
and working on a resolution.

Start Time: 2 hours ago

Last Update: about an hour ago

Updates: There are currently no updates for this issue.

~~~
twic
> Increased Error Rates Created by Gary Fitzpatrick

Well someone tell him to stop, for pete's sake!

~~~
jmts
Pete's in on it too!

------
casper345
The real storm is realizing through Facebook OAuth you cannot access your
affiliate accounts. Caution to move your accounts away from Facebook

Edit: Or have other methods than just relying on Facebook authentication

~~~
rmujica
realized that when trying to play Pokémon Go today, guess I'll break my weekly
challenge...

------
nabla9
Serious question: Was any value lost? (this may appear sarcastic)

Facebook obviously loses some ad revenue and Facebook customers may lose
sales. But do Facebook/Instagram users suffer? But how does losing social
media for several hours affect the quality of life of users?

~~~
nimir
I am not a big fan of social media too but you will be suprised ... For
example here in Sudan (East Africa) the country has been under continuous
protests for over 2 months now (53 dead, 4k+ detained, 500+ injured) with
strong censorship from the regime & silents from the internatinal community.
So facebook, whatsapp & twitter are the only media left for the people to
fight for freedom —> every Thursday is the main protests in the week and this
Wedensday night the outage might affect this as thousands around Sudan won't
know about the meeting points of tomorrow!!!

Actually the government did block all social media for over a month but that
was fixable with vpn. (Follow hashtag #SudanUprising on twitter to learn more)

~~~
nabla9
Interesting point in general, but...

What I asked was what is the effect of sporadic interruptions of few hours. I
mean, if Facebook had 30% availability, would I lose anything valuable from
the experience? Is it that we are just used to it and and want it to be there
always?

The value of 99.5 availability fore __users__ is not clear to me. Instant
messaging is exception for this.

------
btown
I've also seen issues uploading images to Whatsapp in the past half hour. I
wonder if there's anything to do with the Google Cloud Storage outage that
took down Gmail yesterday?

~~~
twothumbsup
Facebook doesn't use GCS (at least they didn't in 2015), they have their own
infrastructure/data centers.

------
dstola
The only things that I can think of that would cause this scale of being down
is either a T1 center outage or (conspiracy hat on) a major hack and everyone
is rush patching

Would be interesting to read the post mortem if there is any regardless

~~~
ajflores1604
Did we ever get a post mortem for the global Youtube outage from late last
year?

~~~
augbog
No but everyone is 99% sure it was related to killing Google+ which was
announced not too long before and everyone who has used YouTube way back when
knows they had to make a Google+ identity at one point to link em. HMMMMM....

------
BucketSort
Google and FB having successive outages? Is this just a coincidence or is
there some shared infrastructure that would explain this?

~~~
aviv
Likely a firmware issue with the NSA intercept devices.

~~~
Theodores
...and their key infrastructure in Venezuela.

~~~
clydethefrog
Yes, I can't help to entertain the thought of another Stuxnet going wild.

------
mizeandmen
Bunch fb employees near pacific catch was talking about how fb was hacked

------
JakeWesorick
[https://www.facebook.com/platform/api-
status/](https://www.facebook.com/platform/api-status/) still returns
"Facebook Platform is Healthy", but you can't even load
[https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/).
Why have status pages if they are so susceptible to going down themselves?

~~~
ceejayoz
I remember an S3 outage a number of years ago where AWS discovered that their
status page was hosted _on_ S3. Whoops!

I believe this is why Github's status page is now on its own domain; so a
github.com DNS outage won't take it down.

~~~
simlevesque
IIRC the AWS status _page_ was fine but the indicator of the status of the
different services was a red or green .PNG which were hosted on S3.

------
tinyhouse
BTW, many apps are affected by this. I cannot log in to any app that uses
Facebook for authentication.

~~~
cheeze
This is one of the many many reasons I don't use fb for auth for any other
websites.

------
jedberg
So yesterday Google had a major (and out of character) outage, and today
Facebook has a major (and also out of character) outage.

I can't wait to see the RCA for both of these and if they're related.

------
Dangeranger
Ironically as I've been checking this post HN has been experiencing errors
loading new comments.

------
llamataboot
Instagram seems to load the feed here fine (EU), but doesn't allow you to log
in from any device or post anything new. FB is totally fine if you are logged
in for reading, but also can't log in if logged out.

VPN to US, insta can login, but still not post.

Distributed services are weird man!

------
markstos
I see they've made some progress putting Instagram on the same infrastructure
as Facebook.

------
subcosmos
:/

Something fun happening in Germany?
[https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-
akamai/re...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/visualizing-akamai/real-
time-web-monitor.jsp)

And Level3 traffic going to Argentina?
[https://twitter.com/bgpstream/status/1105819050968580096](https://twitter.com/bgpstream/status/1105819050968580096)

And GreatBritain going to cambodia?
[https://bgpstream.com/event/197968](https://bgpstream.com/event/197968)

~~~
hokumguru
As a layperson, can you explain what exactly we're looking at here?

~~~
subcosmos
As a techperson ....

barely - BGP is that complex I'm afraid, but its the wild wild west when it
comes to potential nationstate attacks on internet traffic. I wonder if these
patterns are typical or worrysome

------
goblin89
Coincidentally, just watched The Social Network, the plot of which includes
that quote by Mark:

> Let me tell you difference between Facebook and everybody else. We don't
> crash ever! If the serves are down for even a day, our entire reputation is
> irreversibly destroyed. <…>

> Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire use base. The
> users are interconnected. That is the whole point. College kids are online
> because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos
> go.

~~~
ninth_ant
You’re quoting a movie, which played fast and loose with facts to tell a story
(as movies do).

In real life, Facebook had significant issues with uptime in the early years.

~~~
goblin89
Can’t argue with that, however the fact that Facebook used to go down before
would not preclude that each time was (and maybe still is) seen as a major
incident within the original corporate culture.

------
hnruss
Did they move too fast and break too many things?

------
evolvedcleaning
Doesn’t their world class team make such a long outage to be quite unlikely?
How hard would it be to devote ample resources to a cover story for the
“incident report”? Is the timing relative to the plethora of indictments
relevant at all? Reasonable that this may be related to shredding of data
and/or code, or even a cooperation to turn over data to government in secret
deal?

------
minimaxir
Minor update:
[https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1105907126424109056?s=21](https://twitter.com/facebook/status/1105907126424109056?s=21)

> We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can
> confirm that the issue is _not related to a DDoS attack_.

~~~
KennyFromIT
There's something ironic about a social media company being forced to rely on
a competitor to facilitate communication between them and their users.

~~~
mic47
Why? When Facebook is down, you cannot use Facebook to communicate about the
issue. That is also reason why FB still uses* irc instead of messenger for
coordinating how to resolve such issues.

* Or at least used 1 year ago, when I was working there.

~~~
nikanj
Hmm, I wonder if we could leverage that to make irc more popular again. "FB
uses X" is often all the justification small startups need for picking a tech.

~~~
mic47
most startups can use their standard comm channels since most startups are not
doing collaboration/communication tools.

------
wybiral
Look at how many service providers have increased incidents reported here:
[https://downdetector.com/](https://downdetector.com/)

My bet is that people are having problems with FB/Insta and immediately
assuming that the whole internet is messed up.

~~~
_bxg1
Especially if they can't sign in via OAuth. To an average user who signs into
Spotify with their Facebook account, "I can't sign into Spotify" means Spotify
is down, not Facebook.

------
johnchristopher
> The team at Jefferies remains reasonably positive, and in the firm's top
> growth stock calls for the week we found four tech stocks that are offering
> more aggressive accounts good entry points. Carl Court / Getty Images

What's that weird tagline about ?

------
akulbe
In other news, productivity everywhere skyrocketed!

------
alien2003
It's hard to believe that people simply can not live without fresh
instagraphies

------
revskill
What's the cause of outage then ? Disk, memory, CPU, network bandwidth,... ?

------
benatkin
I got my github two factor auth SMS two hours late. Fortunately it was just my
old laptop. I wonder if it was related. Good reminder to set up an
authenticator app on my new phone so I don’t have to rely on SMS!

~~~
0xffff2
Which you should do anyway because relying on SMS is only slightly more secure
than not having 2FA enabled at all...

~~~
benatkin
SMS is still an option if you have a working 2FA Authenticator on GitHub. And
even if I went through the trouble to disable it, I disagree. There are
conceivable ways people could get to my email to initiate a password reset
without getting to my phone, such as snatching my laptop from me while I'm
working at a coffee shop.

------
armortech
Whatever happens right now at Facebook is less important than the fact they
will never say what affected them. Of course nobody would tell 'hey, outage
right now due to 0day / mistake' but...

------
aviral
[https://downdetector.com/status/facebook](https://downdetector.com/status/facebook)

------
entwife
It's an experiment to see whether productivity improves when people aren't
able to access FB and Instagram to slack off.

------
nodesocket
And yet Facebook's stock is still up on the day (+.74%)?

You'd think being down for hours would be negative news and revenue impacting.

~~~
derwiki
2 hours of downtime in a quarter is 0.09% of downtime -- probably very little
effect on their monetization products.

~~~
farisjarrah
We're up to around 7 hours of partial outage now. I have spoken to FB
employees in the past, every hour they are even partially down they are
loosing millions and millions in revenue.

------
boshomi
the issue is also in EU: Is Facebook down? Messenger, site, app and Instagram
hit by issues[1]

[1][https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-
news/faceboo...](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-
news/facebook-down-app-website-crash-15969732)

------
indigochill
First thought when I heard the news was BGP hijacking (ignoring whether
accidental or deliberate). Doesn't the symptom fit other known cases like the
Telegram incident in Iran last year, just at a larger scale?

Admittedly networking is not my strength, so perfectly happy for someone to
shoot down this hypothesis.

------
JDiculous
Is Facebook actually working for anyone?

------
js2
I haven’t been able to post anything on Facebook, neither a new post to my
wall nor add a comment on a friend’s post, since mid-morning US/Eastern and
this is still the case. In addition I can’t login to the site - I am able to
access the site only where I’m already logged-in.

------
bluedino
Instagram works for me on my iPhone, but the comments are all missing. I kind
of like it that way.

~~~
jjulius
You're already logged in so it's just going to show you old content. I'd be
surprised if your able to post anything, or if any "like" you give during the
outage is saved. Same thing is happening with both Instagram and FB apps on
Android for me.

~~~
bluedino
I never do any of those things anyway

------
letientai299
This is the first time I experience this. Also note that current session on
messenger.com still work, we can still send/receive message, but can't upload
any image or send sticker. Looking forward for a post mortem analysis on this.

------
aboutruby
Hacker News might just have a "Major Internet Services" status board.

------
rdtsc
Google then Facebook and Instagram?

My hunch is that it's the end of Q1 and people are trying to release code
changes so they can pad their Q1 performance reviews "designed and delivered
feature X on time in Q1".

~~~
unfunco
"and brought down a service used by billions and losing potentially millions
in revenue."

~~~
abtom
"Move fast break things"

------
bradynapier
Perhaps relevant that npm has been having issues although they only recently
caught and fixed them. Scoped Private npm packages were getting cloudflare 503
errors

------
Endy
Since it went down for PC and not mobile, I was concerned if it was just an
idea of audience testing, in the process of moving to an app-only platform.

------
winrid
Ironic: [https://imgur.com/a/M2SzqIc](https://imgur.com/a/M2SzqIc)

------
boshomi
see also: Facebook, Instagram down: Social media sites not working for many,
FB doing 'required maintenance'

[1] [https://www.abc15.com/news/national/facebook-down-social-
med...](https://www.abc15.com/news/national/facebook-down-social-media-site-
not-working-for-many)

------
llamataboot
Whatsapp now down across much of Europe it looks like. Cannot send/receive
messages.

------
evesprini
Argentina: Whatsapp works for text, but any type of media takes very long to
send.

------
red_admiral
FB has been down for me for around an hour, but has just come back up again.

------
tinyhouse
From Google I got an error clicking on instagram and Quora links today.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
At least you are free of Quora now!

------
peepX
I'm surprised there wasn't a national crisis alert sent out

------
yeutterg
Can confirm. Also, API integrations, such as Buffer, are not working.

------
nathan929
...terrifying API developers everywhere...

------
allannienhuis
seems to be more than just messenger login; All of facebook is super flakey
this morning.

------
deca6cda37d0
Unfortunately the AI software used to censor fake news from facebook has
decided, again, to censor facebook :D

------
abbiya
somebody please wipe off everything from all these big corps

------
pragmaticalien8
must be a super 0 day.

------
nilskidoo
Affecting more lives than any terrorist act.

------
jak92

      ... and nothing of value was lost.

------
shrthnd
I didn't notice.

------
njn
Good! Keep them down.

------
arisAlexis
yesterday Google and today Facebook. My conspirator says it's the Chinese
government showcasing.

~~~
mdkdog
Meanwhile in Russia they are talking about disconnecting their network from
the rest of the world. Some test gone south?... Maybe... Someone has a
traceroute handy?

------
zomg
All my funny cat videos and memes are loading fine. Did you try rebooting your
router 62 times?

All joking aside, is _this_ news? :/

~~~
blhack
One of the largest internet companies in the world having a massive, global
outage?

Yes, that seems like appropriate news for "hacker news", a website where
people discuss technology news.

~~~
zomg
wow, tough crowd today. i didn't think people took facebook and instagram so
seriously.

i'll put the sarcasm machine back in the drawer.

~~~
icebraining
This is HN, we take everything seriously.

------
miloignis
My fiance's uncle sent something today that because of a school shooting in
Brazil, they were blocking all images and video shared to social networks like
"WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and other social networks". I haven't been able
to verify this myself or from any other sources, but I wonder if either people
are misinterpreting the FB outage or if Brazil is blocking content it's having
weird ripple effects.

