This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Sushmita Mallick
A personal account of how I, an outsider and a fellow software dev, felt about it
Yesterday Facebook and its family of apps — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger went off the radar completely for 6 hours, as if someone went to server farms and pulled their cables out. The largest outage in the history of Facebook, it is estimated that the overall six-hour outage of the platforms resulted in losses to the global economy exceeding $1bn US dollars.
While yesterday’s outage must have been a nightmare for people working in Facebook (I feel so sorry for the on-call guys!), it was interesting to read about exactly what went wrong and appreciate how the Internet we use today, something which has billions of people depending on it for their daily tasks, jobs and entertainment, is built on a very complex network of a million systems working together in harmony.
While the outage was certainly not desirable, it’s times like these that rekindle my childlike wonder about the invisible magic that Computer Science pulls every day. I remember the first time dad got a computer for home when I was in third grade. It was a desktop with a bulky CRT monitor, with Windows 95 installed and equipped with an Intel Pentium processor. Sitting in front of the desktop screen emanating a warm blue glow, I wondered “What next?” (The answer was unlimited MS Paint 😄 )
Similarly, this morning I found myself reading up about what could have possibly gone so wrong in an organisation with thousands of some of the smartest engineers that it took hours to fix it. It served as a gentle reminder how even the giant companies with so many layers of approvals, security checks and end-to-end testing were one configuration change away from taking off almost three billion active users down.
I wonder the horror the employees went through when not only Facebook family of apps were down, their internal communication & security systems, office access key cards stopped working — making them unable to effectively communicate with their colleagues, login remotely or physically access the office premises, when they needed it the most! Thankfully during my on-calls in Amazon, I have never got a Sev 1, that too that affects 3 billion people. So, yeah, something to be grateful for during my next sleepless on-call shift :)
While this was a one off (hopefully) and the best minds are already working on not letting it repeat again, I wonder if this would have happened if things were more decentralised, if we need to move to a web that’s more resilient and secure by principle— the Web 3. It feels like there’s too much power and responsibility given to a single source of truth when it comes to an organisation that is the equivalent to the Internet in some developing countries — maybe blockchain is the way to go.
Overall, I am really excited to see where this journey takes us, maybe Facebook itself will come up something really cool that’s more fault tolerant and gives more power to the content consumer. Twitter is already on its way to a decentralised social media platform with project Bluesky. So, maybe, that day isn’t far away.
Here’s a blog by CloudFare that delves into the technical details of the outage.
If you would like to connect, hit me up on LinkedIn!
Sev 1: Facebook is down! was originally published in Level Up Coding on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Level Up Coding - Medium and was authored by Sushmita Mallick
Sushmita Mallick | Sciencx (2021-10-08T07:30:12+00:00) Sev 1: Facebook is down!. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/10/08/sev-1-facebook-is-down/
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