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by runawaybottle 1715 days ago
We almost went down the ‘this is a subterfuge to delete whistleblower evidence’ rabbit hole.
3 comments

I saw a couple of people clearly guessing something along these lines but none of them seemed to be claiming that it was actually happening, more like “isn’t it convenient that…”
The timing was uncanny. I still don't see a reason why it couldn't have been an intrusion/rogue employee? Like someone had access to a system to push router firmware updates or something?
A rogue employee would have been very easy to detect and that employee would have known this. The core network infrastructure involved is extremely sensitive and is quite unlikely to be accessible in a break in.

Also IIRC an employee was posting on Reddit saying the incident started shortly after a network update was posted this morning.

When you know more about the tech and systems involved a mistake seems infinitely more likely than sabotage.

Many have pointed out a couple of weeks ago Facebook released a paper talking about a new system to automate the management of the their BGP routing.

Seems like the new system having an unanticipated flaw is a far more likely scenario than a malicious actor.

More boring - but usually the boring stuff is the far more reasonable.

I could have believed it given Facebook’s record for unpleasantness, but I think the fact it must have cost them tens of millions in advertising revenue is evidence against this. Even the closest thing we have to a cyberpunk dystopia isn’t going to throw that much money down the crapper to bury bad press.
Did we, really?
There are a lot of comments promoting the idea here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28751224

Some of them seem to actually say it's likely, not just possible.