This morning — and for about six hours — millions billions were having shit fits because Facebook went offline, along with a bunch of its affiliate partners like Instagram, WhatsApp and others.
I realized that the only trivial annoyances for me were that the "messenger" service was offline for a while. I use Messenger because it's more feature rich than just sending people plain SMS messages, and I also have a couple of "business pages" for my artwork and for my writing.
Mrs. Denmarkguy and I had a fun time sitting on the back porch, cooking up increasingly outlandish "conspiracy theory scenarios" as we imagined all Facebook employees... right down to the janitorial staff and the guys who man the parking garage booths at FB headquarters... being ordered to get on a computer and start "scrubbing" any file, image, message and memo for any incriminating evidence related to the "60 Minutes" whistleblower... and then reconnecting all the dots in such a way that it would look like nothing was ever there.
We then concluded that the "flagging for deletion" process started within minutes of the program airing, and the actual outage started when the physical purge was ready to start running. The whole process would make Watergate look like meeting Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.
There was even a nice piece of "misdirection" as stories surfaced that the core information from 1.5 billion Facebook accounts was now being traded/available on a known hacker site on the dark web.
Of course, we will probably never know what actually took place — nor what "caused" the global outage... but it was fun to speculate!
As the services came back online, Facebook released a typically goobledigook statement:
"Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt."
Speculation aside, the whole incident does seem like a lovely illustration of the inherent risks associated with large scale centralized media and social media. Essentially, Facebook (and other services) are a "black box," meaning that we put stuff (our content) IN and something comes out at the other end... and everything in between is basically an inaccessible mystery aka a "black box."
I found myself extremely grateful that the vast majority of my content creation and online activities take place through Hive and its surrounding communities... so there was really no great "loss" for me. Yes, I do use large centralized venues — primarily eBay (as a seller), YouTube (streaming music) and Google (mostly gmail) — but my exposure to their shortcomings is limited.
I couldn't help but feel some empathy for those (including our own adult kids) whose lives are intricately woven into Facebook, Instagram and so on. Thankfully, I am old enough to remember a world before the Internet, so I don't start getting "twitchy" when I can't get online!
How about YOU? Were you in anyway affected by the outage? Or do you not used traditional social media, at all? Do you even HAVE a Facebook account? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20211004 22:50 PDT
0361/1602
I'm not a social media guy. Like you I use youtube, but it is mostly for music listening. Yeah I have a gmail account but am trying to make the switch to Proton mail. I have/had a facebook account when it first came out, did not like it still do not like it and still do not use it.
I got real annoyed with the likes of ICQ and one other instant message type system way way back in the day, and have never since signed up for another instant type message. people can send a letter, send an email, or make a phone call, and since very few have any of that information I am not being ping ponged every 12 minutes.
I still think it was an internal scrub thing, and it looks like it was an internal error and not an outside DDoS type attack, so I think no one will ever know how much purging went on.
My wife gets far more into it than I ever have... I just don't care for the eternal cycle of people's inflated "highlight reels" of their lives.
I'm sure they did a lot of scrubbing. They are huge, high profile and constantly at risk of being taken to task for being a monopoly.
Many years back I worked for a small educational software company — a subsidiary of a larger company — and evidently some of the stuff we'd been doing was against parent company policy. So when there was going to be a "visit" (aka "audit") everybody got to work on removing every conceivable reference to anything that might invite comment or sanctions... code, email, memos, post-it notes on people's cubicle walls.. you name it.
Facebook? I'm sure they were just prepping to be poked by the FCC, SEC and Congress.
The news was somewhat funny when I heard it. I mean, Facebook and the likes seemed indispensable and deeply rooted. Yesterday's incident was just prove that you shouldn't fully depend on man-made things.
I didn't know about it because I was busy doing some other things. I got to a gathering and I was asked
"Wongi, can you access your Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram?"
Immediately I tried accessing them and they were not accessible. Well I wasn't really affected, I just got back to what I was doing.
It does seem like an organization that large would not "go down," so we become suspicious that what they were doing might have been a little sketchy, and deliberately staged.
I'm glad I only rarely use any of those services.
Whatever they tried doing, hope they got their result.
But they sure lost a lot of money tho.
I use Facebook Marketplace for local sales and Whatsapp. I could live without both without missing a beat really. I am very grateful for Hive!