And.. why is it down now and not when I was working? At least, it helped me become a bit more productive last time. This time, it's just ruining my night. ;)
And this really does need to go on the front page because far too many startups are using Facebook Login, and the recent partnership with YC to get YC startups hooked on the FB platform.
This does not look intentional. If they were just rolling out a front-end change, they wouldn't have killed their APIs like Connect and the Like buttons.
Facebook rolls our code changes independent of product releases. They just need to flip a configuration switch (usually for a small percentage of users at first) to launch a product, not release code. This can still cause site issues, but usually just some error message, not the entire site being down.
What a fantastic explosion of buzzwords and slightly bizarre assertions.
I know you interned at Facebook and are familiar with the site architecture, but the majority of the things you've mentioned here had absolutely nothing to do with the last outage, and it's far too early to draw any conclusions about the current unavailability.
This sounds interesting but you're using a lot of jargon, could expand on it?
I know the thundering herd problem is when a resource goes away and then everybody tries to fetch it the moment it comes back up, sending it down again. What is the subscription update model you're referring to, and to what portion of the system does it apply? I was under the impression that user stream updates were distributed somewhat asynchronously, and were heavily cached, but I could be wrong.
I wasn't really asking if it is down. When I submitted the post, I already confirmed that it is down. This is a major problem for the whole internet now that a lot of of websites use Facebook Connect and other APIs. Some businesses run on Facebook. It's a news. Definitely tech related. Definitely interesting for HN aficionados.
To be fair, people stopped blaming Rails for Twitter a while back, after it became clear that the problem was mostly at the data level.
Likewise, nobody (well, except liuliu) is blaming PHP for Facebook's downtime, since last time they blamed it on a poorly-handled failure case after an accidental misconfiguration:
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadThe Like buttons and Facebook Connect are also affected. When Facebook goes down like this, huge numbers of websites are affected.
Really no need for this to go on the front page though...
http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/www.amazon.com
And this really does need to go on the front page because far too many startups are using Facebook Login, and the recent partnership with YC to get YC startups hooked on the FB platform.
If you rely on a buggy platform, and it fails, you subsequently have your site fail. This is a perfect example of exactly how this goes about, too.
I know you interned at Facebook and are familiar with the site architecture, but the majority of the things you've mentioned here had absolutely nothing to do with the last outage, and it's far too early to draw any conclusions about the current unavailability.
I know the thundering herd problem is when a resource goes away and then everybody tries to fetch it the moment it comes back up, sending it down again. What is the subscription update model you're referring to, and to what portion of the system does it apply? I was under the impression that user stream updates were distributed somewhat asynchronously, and were heavily cached, but I could be wrong.
I was unaware of BigPipe, but a good explanation is here: http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-p...
However, I don't understand what you mean by a streaming model as it applies to web page generation.
What is interesting is the postmortem of a failure. Post that when it is available.
PS: Let the downvoting begin
Likewise, nobody (well, except liuliu) is blaming PHP for Facebook's downtime, since last time they blamed it on a poorly-handled failure case after an accidental misconfiguration:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-deta...