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by oarsinsync 1717 days ago
> Facebook's routing shenanigans slowed down the entire internet

This is Hacker News, so the distinction between network performance, server performance and application performance should matter.

"The Internet" did not slow down. "The Internet" infact probably had more available capacity as a result of Facebook's outage, as all those bits of outrage and cats ceased to be transferred for the duration.

Some applications may have seen performance hits, as a result of poorly thought out dependencies on an external service without graceful failure.

Some applications may have seen increased load and suffered due to server resourcing constraints, caused by applications like the above failing to fail gracefully, and instead polling more aggressively.

> They don't have a right to privacy here, and we are all owed an explanation

Morally / ethically, you're right. The fact that Facebook exists in it's current form tells me that morals and ethics aren't particularly important to the real world.

1 comments

Perhaps you're unaware that billions of devices attempting to resolve Facebook's unresolvable domains effectively DDOS-ed the DNS system? It most certainly did slow down big chunks of internet which otherwise had nothing to do with Facebook.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/4/22709123/facebook-outage-...

> Some applications may have seen increased load and suffered due to server resourcing constraints, caused by applications like the above failing to fail gracefully, and instead polling more aggressively.

I had Cloudflare's woes in mind when I wrote that.

So your point is that it didn't slow down the entire Internet, only the parts of the Internet that use DNS (damn near all of them)?
Based on cloudflare's own blog[0], 1% of queries went unanswered for about 10 mins, and were significantly delayed for a few hours. 5% of queries were delayed for a couple of hours. 95% of queries continued to be resolved as normal.

This is referring explicitly to users of 1.1.1.1, which is likely not the same infrastructure as domains hosted by cloudflare dns.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/october-2021-facebook-outage/