[codedeadlock]

How can you explain yesterday's outage (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) to your parents?

You are feeling hungry and went to food court. The food court (open area) has a lot of options. You sit down in front of Domino's (Facebook), since you want to eat garlic bread. Now, you can't order from the counter directly. The waiter will come to your seat and ask for the order. You ordered garlic bread from the waiter, but the guy at Domino's counter went missing. Your order was not reaching to the chef in kitchen as Domino's counter guy was not present.

This explains why Domino's (Facebook) ecosystem was down, but what about other vendors? They had nothing to do with Facebook.

To understand this, we need to go back to our food court again. Now, there are a lot of hungry people sitting outside Domino. Since they were not getting answer from one waiter as why their food is not on their table, they started disturbing all the waiters. Due to this, majority of the waiters were trying to figure out where the Domino's counter guy went and other food joints (read websites) were not able to fulfil their own orders.

So although only Domino's was down, it appeared as if whole Food Court (Internet) was facing issues.

Counter Guy at Domino's - Facebook Nameservers Waiters - DNS Servers (Cloudflare, Google, Akamai)

[Philip-J-Fry]

I'd just say that you had an address for Facebook in your address book. The page somehow vanished and you don't know their address any more. So you start phoning other people and knocking on their door to try and find what their address is. Everyone else is doing this and no one knows what their address is. So you've got millions of people phoning each other and knocking on doors.

Facebook being down was already an issue, but everyone phoning and knocking on doors was causing disruption to everyone else.

[srcmap]

If your parent is startrek fan, tell him "Commander Data" transmitted a "sleep" command to BGP (Borg Gateway Protocol) collective.

As result, the borg collectives can access to network, even 7of9 can't enter the campus.

[miked85]

I think that this may be more confusing than the actual explanation.

[codedeadlock]

Thanks for the feedback. I will simplify it further!

[5560675260]

There is no need to make it any more complex than "facebook, the company, messed up, now their properties are broken". An overly elaborated analogy just makes you sound condescending.

[samhw]

He's trying to explain the knock-on effect on other websites. I don't see how this is at all condescending.

[BFG-One]

don't think the parents (target audience) would think he sounds condescending.

[Moru]

Just use the industry standard car analogy instead :-)

[rvnx]

Another way to see the situation:

Internet is just a bunch of computers interconnected via tons of cables (hence the name; "inter-networked computers").

To be reachable, every equipment and computer constantly need to tell the others about their existence (to publicly announce on which network cable they can be reached at).

Facebook engineers wanted to optimise that system but accidentally broke it during the update.

As a consequence, after a few minutes, other computers didn't know on which cables they can reach Facebook.

Facebook had to call the technicians sitting in the datacenter to cancel the last change that was done (because the Facebook engineers couldn't themselves connect from the office) and everything was fine again.

[ccakes]

You need to call Facebook to find out what your friends have been up to but their number has temporarily disappeared from the phone book.

[phtrivier]

That would have been accurate for a DNS outage ; but with my layman understanding of BGP, I would say the analogy would be something between "...but their phone line is broken" and "...but they disappeared from the phone book because they don't have a phone line any more" .

Is that right ?

[pitkali]

Is that an interesting distinction for the target audience, though?

[WorldMaker]

Actually, it probably is, especially if you dial the analogy back a couple decades before the "We're sorry that number has been disconnected" automated responses: Facebook's phone line went down and when you call the Operator even if you have the phone number, they can't connect you, but this is weird and you aren't the only one trying to call Facebook so now they are calling in other Operators to diagnose the problem because surely someone has heard from Facebook recently.

That analogy includes the snowball impact on the other websites and services as the Switchboard Operators get more over-utilized into puzzling out Facebook's problem than servicing calls for still working phone numbers.

[philposting]

I explained it as Facebook the city still existing, but they'd taken down the signposts.

[juanuys]

How about this:

Mum, dad - you know how I always tell you to turn your stuff off and on again?

Well, by turning it off, Facebook also turned off the On Button.

[corobo]

Analogies serve to confuse half the audience and make the other half go "actually it's more like .."

[BFG-One]

cool, but were did mark zuckerberg (dominos chef) go? he felt dissed so he ran and hid?