Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp Outage(developers.facebook.com) |
Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp Outage(developers.facebook.com) |
Mark Zuckerberg Inside "Fak how many advertisement money and user data we lost due to this outage."
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.
People will very often see it as "service x with fb login is broken"
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)
I would say "why not Matrix?".
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)
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.
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).
I can find a legal solution to your technical blockades. Be careful what you ask for.
legislative... senator.
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_...
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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
https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/CenturyLink+Outage+Causing...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/centurylink-outage-led-to-a-3-...
I remember reading about the protocol and thinking something like: this seems awfully "hippie-trust" levels of security.
Granted, this was 10 years ago so my recollection of BGP is super fuzzy :-D
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!
Some folks in congress are savvy about technology however, such as Wyden.
What happens if you don’t? You get fired or put on a PIP?
So you're calibrated as if you are a 5. But if you're still a 4 because you're not delivering as a 5... then you'll fail to meet expectations, naturally. The rest sort of takes care of itself.
Pro tip: ask them for the severance instead of the PIP, and GTFO.
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).
In fact phone operators for a while tried to ban whatsapp here, SMS prices in Brazil are just nuts (it is normal for an SMS cost fifty cents or so, sometimes even more, a full SMS conversation can cost you several days worth of food).
Everyone here just uses whatsapp, because of how ridiculous SMS prices are.
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/iphone_...
https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/iphone_...
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.
Here we have core infrastructure that isn't sold to anyone else and powering 3 supposedly different social messaging services.
The key isn't the backend, it's the supposed independence of the frontends.
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.
> 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.
Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.
The summary is that the Chicago school of Economics promoted the idea that in a competitive market, predatory pricing is not possible. Thus, when you see an industry structure emerge (e.g. duopoly), you should assume that it is an efficient competitive outcome. After this, instead of focusing on market share percentages, antitrust authorities began to focus primarily on consumer harm (which is much more challenging to show in court e.g. for predatory pricing, you cannot only argue that your competitor has very low prices right now, you also have to prove that they intend to raise prices once they achieve monopoly power).
Given the current makeup of the court, it seems extremely unlikely that the justices would overturn this precedent.
That's what I love about these forums, is getting the cultural experiences of other people and finding out they're not always the same as your experiences. Very eye-opening.
>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.
Server side was a few python components with lots of tricks in Postgres for scaling purposes. You didn't have any real choices for what language you used in iOS
within trusted groups of ISPs where the admins all know each other, in certain specific geographic regions, it's better than others.. I would say that the number of ISPs I could call "fully compliant" with current best practices, in the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver area, is higher than in many other parts of the world.
Anecdote: I was surprised to find they honour TTLs on their DNS service. Everyone else I have access to seems to return the new IP almost immediately, but shaw waits it out.
As for other current best practices there's really a very great variety of disciplines involved in ISP operations, depending on what type of ISP it is. What's relevant for a GPON FTTH last mile provider might not be as relevant for a colocation/dedicated server ISP. Or for a WISP. My recommendation on that would be to pick the subject to research and make inquiries in the special interest groups dedicated to that (for instance, two way satellite, or automated billing/provisioning systems for hosting companies, or CRM systems, or whatever).
For the vast majority of my messages, I'm fine with them living on their servers. If I need to send credentials to my family, I can use an e2e channel. For me, it's a step up from hangouts and definitely better than whatsapp or facebook messenger.
Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though.
These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
Because he refused to comply with government demands to identify activists using VK, Durov was personally ousted from the company (and self-exiled from Russia altogether).
While refreshing my Durov trivia, I found he published a text a couple days ago, and this following passage just had a good vibe; “I focused on what I enjoyed most – creating social platforms that (hopefully) bring good to humanity. I spent most of my personal funds on Telegram for people to enjoy a free service that strives for perfection.”[1]
[1]: https://telegra.ph/Consume-Less-Create-More-Its-More-Fun-12-...
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.
In Spain in fact it's ridiculous - surveys show approx 97% of the population saying they use it regularly (https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...).
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2015/02/16/inenglish/14240... has some interesting background on why. I suspect also the fact that Latin America tends to use whatsapp quite heavily (https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...) probably makes a difference too.
Latin America is basically WhatsApp and nothing else.
https://www.messengerpeople.com/global-messenger-usage-stati...
iMessage and Telegram covers everyone I know.
She probably doesn't know what an SMS is (those are those things her bank sends her, right?).
She knows that the green Whatsapp logo is for talking to her friends.
She probably wouldn't click the envelope looking thing.
(I'm not being facetious - IMO HN readers massively overestimate user capability.)
I remember I missed a few calls from my mom recently, and she asked me if I noticed her missed calls. I didn't have any missed calls as she was calling me through WhatsApp, but in such a way that she thought is the "regular" way of calling. I explained, now she knows. Not sure where this is going...
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).
Also I have a dumbphone and I am the only person my friend send SMS too. That makes me quite a unique person !
SMS only works if you live in a region where unlimited SMS plans are standard AND you don't have any friends outside of that region OR WhatsApp doesn't have market share there. Basically only US.
Essentially no-one as we've all stopped trading actual phone numbers years ago.