back to article Facebook blames outage on internal config flaw

Facebook has published a detailed explanation of an internal configuration flaw that left the site unavailable for around two and a half hours overnight - the social network's worst downtime in four years. The outage stemmed from a cascading series of problems involving an error correction system that feed into a feedback loop …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Guus Leeuw
    WTF?

    Your thingy is too long

    So? Sites go down. Who cares....

  2. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
    IT Angle

    I only just

    made it through the outage in one piece.... I had to take my anti stress pills because I was not able to log in to fb for 2 and 1/2 hours.

    Anymore and I'd be ready for a strait jacket

    And think of all those poor neglected farmville animals too

  3. bafj
    Pirate

    It makes me cross

    Each time Facebook publishes any kind of technical information, their post is plagued by hundreds of people commenting and claiming to know how to do it better or fix it. And generally they're talking absolute crap.

    Facebook may not be perfect but they know what they're doing.

    I'm not sure why it makes me so cross - but it does. It really does!

    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Re: It makes me cross

      I'm with you. Some of the replies were so mind blowingly dumb that I first laughed, and then got angry at the ignorant arrogance of these people.

      I don't mind people who aren't knowledgeable on a particular subject (there are MANY that I am clueless about), but I hate people who think they are knowledgeable when they aren't, or those that just lie and bullshit

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Joke

        re: but I hate people who think they are knowledgeable

        >> but I hate people who think they are knowledgeable or those that just lie and bullshit

        I can't help thinking forums, the Internet and especially blogsphere isn't a place for you to escape those you hate. I would also advise you to steer clear of any chief executives/board members of large companies

        Seriously it is probably best to just ignore them

  4. Jamie Jones Silver badge

    Mr.

    I await lots of the usual self-righteous comments, so I'll summarise them so you don't have to:

    1) Who cares? It's only facebook.

    2) Facebook is for saddos. No-one with a real life uses it.

    3) Facebook is evil. They steal all your information and send it to advertisers

    4) Anyone who uses facebook deserves all they get

    5) Facebook is always going slow or breaking down.

    Any I've missed?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      hmm

      I've not yet met a person who said 'I don't use Facebook' who wasn't some odd hermitted freak, who is generally doing the world a favour by not being on it.

      1. Chrome

        @hmm

        Really? I've never used the site at all, ever and have a very good social life, thanks. I can't walk 5 yards down the street before I bump into someone I know. Every drinking establishment I frequent I always know at least 1/3 of the patrons

        I think I'm doing myself a favour by not being on it but I never got into the whole Web2.0 socialising thing so no standard FB put-downs from me, it just entertains me that people *need* FB to have a life

    2. IMVHO

      You missed...

      ...it's the move that dunnit.

    3. IMVHO

      You missed...

      ...it's the movie that dunnit.

      Crap, left an "i" out the frist post. Poop, crap, and shit, all on a stck.

  5. Neal 5

    Calamity?, What calamity

    Ah, now I see it.

    "In the meantime, this system has been taken out of commission."

  6. Tzael

    Noticed a peculiarity

    This might explain why I was getting a security certificate error when trying to go to https://www.facebook.com - what surprised me was that the certificate was issued to an akamai.com sub domain, not www.facebook.com as expected.

    I guess now I know Facebook uses Akamai's products and services.

    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Mr.

      .Facebook uses Akamai for the static files, such as photos, images, etc.

      They don't use it for the main www site normally.

      However, yesterday, during the outage, they changed the DNS entry for www.facebook.com to point to:

      root@northway# host www.facebook.com.

      www.facebook.com is an alias for sorry.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net.

      sorry.ak.facebook.com.edgesuite.net is an alias for a1030.g.akamai.net.

      a1030.g.akamai.net has address 92.122.127.27

      a1030.g.akamai.net has address 92.122.127.33

      As they said, they needed to stop all traffic to fix the problem, so temporarily diverting to their network of akamai servers seemed to be way they chose to do it

  7. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    What?

    Faecebook was down and.... the World didn't stop turning?!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      clearly

      Superman was spinning it during the downtime.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    P2P

    A good demonstration of why we need to get P2P social networking sorted, not reliant on one point of failure (or control & backups etc)

    1. roknich
      Pint

      It was only fecebook, why worry?

      they were only down for 2 and a half hours. is that a crisis?

      by the way, whatever security problems there are in the new facebook alternative -

      diaspora - should theoretically be easy to fix, because everyone insists that the language it uses - Ruby - is inherently secure when properly used, so I look forward to a true non-exploitative Fecebook alternative soon. As for Myspace - I think and international deployment of Drupal 7 with redundant servers is a potential replacement. Drupal 7 is still in alpha, so here's shitspace.org - up and running with drupal 6.19 and sqlite 3.22.x

      no users yet!

      http://shitspace.org

      create an account and if you want to improve on it, as Ralph to up your privileges

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Alan Davies

    /b/

    Are you telling me 4chan didn't have anything to do with this?

    /disappointment

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    get a life ?

    I laugh at all the people telling facebook users to "get a life" etc.

    Ha. Ha. Ha.

    I got exactly the same sort of glib condescending shyte from people when I used Cix for the first time, fidonet or indeed email/www.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get a Life ....

    Hmm yeah real funny, it's amazing the diverse range of people on facebook actually. Sure there is a minority of trolls / saddo's on there but isn't there everywhere.

    It is the one great way to keep in touch with everyone save having to write an e-mail not revealing anyone's e-mail address to anyone else, also anyone comments on it anyone else can see that too (depending on privacy settings), can't really do that with a BCC e-mail.

    The groups on there are diverse as the people on it, and aren't all "saddo" groups, maybe someone should go on facebook and find some groups on say "autism" maybe they'd open your eyes slightly they did mine..

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This was no accident

    Just so you guys are aware, this was not an accident, and don't believe Facebooks cover story. This was a planned attack by 4chan.

  14. Gavin Jamie
    Joke

    Standard solution

    I am not particuarly gifted in the ways of mult datacentre server management but the ultimate solution appeared to be to turn it off and on again.

    Outsourced to Renholm Industries?

  15. JaitcH
    Happy

    A lot of people are happy not to have Facebook ...

    in China,

    Mongolia,

    Tibet and VietNam!

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like