You guys know I had to do it.
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
And I can’t steal this meme and post it on Facebook.
And Leon is getting larger!
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a Facebook outage
I hope that Facebook’s servers and hard drives are all irreparably fried and none of their websites ever function again. A man can dream, can’t he?
Huh. Didn’t notice the outage and couldn’t care less if they had stayed down for good. The anguished cries and the gnashing of teeth from addicts to the evil den of corruption that them social media platforms would’ve been music to my ears. ;-D
As for the meme: “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Get to the tower!!” LOL
Oh, my goodness. Lemmingbook is indeed down, and it’s getting to be late afternoon. I wonder what can have happened to it. Where shall we go for our regular dose of “All your friends are jumping off bridges! Find bridges near you!”?
For the curious, Ars Technica has some info here. Apparently it’s a routing screwup that made all-things-Farcebook inaccessible… yeah, might as well have pulled the plug. Even clobbered things like the electronic door locks on their buildings (or the locks’ ability to check credentials). If they’ve got the high-tech locks on the datacenter with the routers, and nobody is in there already, dynamite may be required. Funsies!
Different root cause apparently, but this reminds me of an event a decade or so ago where a whole country (Pakistan?) went off the net for a day or two. The cause was a bad BGP route redirecting that entire range of IP addresses to some random place like Hong Kong.
Allegedly no malice was involved in that case, though I think the evidence to support that claim was rather weak. It did tell me that the network was seriously vulnerable to such things if someone wanted to apply malice in the future. The answer is also clear (though difficult) — cryptography to protect route integrity. Not clear if that was done. I mentioned it to a colleague, who got her Ph.D. from MIT on a thesis describing this problem and how to solve it, work she did back in the 1980s when no one believed there was a solution.
Don’t blame us, it was the algorithm’s fault.
I work in IT support one of our guys got the classic “the Internet is down” panic calls when bookface went off line. We got a good laugh.