[ceejayoz]

It's hardly unheard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

An organization Facebook's size isn't gonna be applying configuration changes to one server at a time over SSH, either. A server configuration can easily affect thousands of machines across the globe if it's deployed to them all.

[wyre]

Shy did I take so long for Facebook to release the cause of the outage? If they are applying configuration changes at a large level shouldnt it be fairly easy for them to figure out what was the cause?

[ceejayoz]

That's silly. Error rates show as elevated on https://developers.facebook.com/status/dashboard/ until 11pm Pacific yesterday. The @facebook Twitter account sent out a statement basically within an hour of the start of the next business day.

[viraptor]

Possibly because it doesn't matter to us really. The postmortem will be interesting to read if they publish it, but otherwise - it stopped working. Time to explain it to the peanut gallery is better spent dealing with the actual issue.