skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who knows. I use PiHole where all DNS records are cached. Maybe this is the reason why it happens to me. And regards Twitter (obviously), I'm not the only one who is facing this weird behaviour.
Those communications are done over irc at FB for exactly this purpose.
Why use MSFT-overlayed Chrome(aka Edge) at all instead of just using Chrome?

Edge will always lag Chrome for security matters and MSFT will just be yet another surveillance layer within it.

Just use Firefox folks. It's fast, secure-ish and leaves you only one threat actor to keep track of instead of two.
For Android there's a setting that can scale down the modern UIs to render more on your screens. The "display size" setting seems to fix everything for me, even the UI for some games!

If you configure the setting to be small enough many apps will detect your phone as a tablet, though, leading to some funky tablet layouts. Your mileage may vary, but for me everything works out great.
How does your pricing compare to the cloud providers?
What has happened in western countries but most dramatically in North America is that "left" vs "right" has been transformed from a strong disagreement about management of the economy to a strong disagreement about how to manage the culture.

This is because in the US especially the "left" in the traditional socialist sense -- and its allies in the union movement and among students and academia -- have lost the class war. Since Clinton and Blair, there is no political space left for serious redistributive politics and the parties claiming the mantle of "left" or "social democratic" in the west have mostly given up. I'd say anti-capitalism remains strong among their base, but for all intents and purposes there is no path towards actually enacting policy... Which is why "Medicare for All" can be insanely popular in the United States across the population and voters of parties but still never ever become successful legislation.

And it's also why I find it so hilarious to see right wingers talk about the "MSM" and calling things like CNN "left wing"; all the bitching about "wokeness" and griping about culture wars and so on and complaining that somehow the "left" dominates society... It's amazing because in the context of what "left" meant for most of the 20th century... the left lost. It's gone. And I say this as a strong proponent of its classic positions.
Got a good chuckle imagining a fuming Zuckerberg not being allowed into his office, thinking the world is falling apart.
The edit would have been better if you'd left off the first four words in it. It's not your terseness that's the issue.
Idk, any of the big ones. Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, e.g.
That's why the gym is so busy today.
HexChat IRC Client Developer Reaches Out for Help
That's a pretty accurate description of the site, lol.

On a side-note, I think you'll enjoy some of the videos by the YouTube 'Internet Historian' on 4chan:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvjwXhCNZcU

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiTqIyx6tBU
Shark-towed submarines of the future (1923)
Another side effect:

Two of our local mobile operators are experiencing issues with phone calls due to network overload.

https://twitter.com/claroelsalvador/status/14450819333319598...
This is not completely accurate. The whole reason a registrar with domain abc.com can use ns1.abc.com is because glue records are established at the registry, this allows a bootstrap that keeps you in from a circular dependency. All that said it’s usually a bad idea, for someone as large as Facebook they should have nameservers across zones ie a.ns.fb.com
b.ns.fb.org
c.ns.fb.co
Etc…
There are a lot of people who work at Facebook, and I'm sure the people responsible for policing external comms do not have the skills or access to fix what's wrong right now.
Originally, you did not need a facebook account to use oculus after purchase. They framed this as "you do not need to integrate social media/facebook".

This ^ means fuck-all, because at that time (day 1), their oculus services where hosted in the same infrastructure as their social media services.

Last year, they got rid of "you do not need a facebook account". But in all situations since inception, all of your data is passing through the same infrastructure as facebook data. It may not be being exposed, or targeted for advertising, but this WAS a huge point of contention years back.
> If we look at another societal thing that historically a huge chunk of the population did -- smoking -- it was known that it kills you, horribly, but it took taken more than sixty to eighty years for the public to get that message, and now society is slowly adjusting [at least in Europe] with real public benefits. If an effect is present with alcohol, even a small one, the integrated effect would be massive and it's a very scientifically valid question to ask.

But it's not if an effect is present: we do in fact know that alcohol consumption causes cancer. The link is well-established. What is surprising is that most people aren't aware that this link exists. IIRC the number of Americans aware of the link is something like 30%. According to this (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/08/only-one-10-...) only 1 in 10 Britons is aware. (I assume even fewer people are aware that processed meat causes cancer.)

I understand what you're saying, of course, given that there might be some benefits that outweigh the risks when you calculate overall mortality. However, speaking personally, I think I would rather die of heart disease than cancer. In fact, compared to death by cancer, a heart attack sounds like a blessing (of course I'm aware there are other, slower and also nasty ways to go that are related to heart disease — but still). The main issue being, of course, that at least a slow death gives you some time to say goodbye and arrange your affairs. Still: I'd rather go quick and clean.

It's a morbid subject, but after recently reading The Emperor Of All Maladies, a masterful "biography" of cancer, this has been on my mind quite a bit. I love to drink, but I'm wondering if it's worth it.
I grew up with internet, and had to deal with cyberbullies long before most knew what internet was. I think my inclination to clean up after myself and natural aversion for exposing too many personal details (I.e. didn't sign up for any social media, nor any (local) precursors) helped me steer clear of the worst of this. I'm surprised that so many are so blasé about this, while it's raining stories of cyberbullying, measurable increases in youth depression and lonelyness, identity theft and then regular theft.

I wear a seatbelt, a mask, and I take care of myself online as well. Seems like the facts are clear on all of those.
How often do the apps try to reconnect? Does anyone know?
It is pretty well available — and quickly — via piracy means, which I have always thought interesting for its somewhat esoteric content.
I put my tinfoil hat on and came up with this early on, but the outage has gone on for far too long for the price to be worth it now. They're losing millions and millions of dollars from this.

I'm now leaning towards possible inside job related to the recent string of bad press. If this is an external hack it's incredible.

If this is a simple mistake... Facebook seems dangerously incompetent.
Anything can be responsible or dangerous. Woodworking can be bad. I had relatives who would go down to the garage or basement and aggressively push wood through tablesaws to vent off steam. They didn't have all their fingers.
Their market cap doesn't have anything to do with how much cash they have.
I do know that many plants which require power to bootstrap themselves maintain emergency generation facilities (with battery backup for the diesel/natural gas engine starters). Hopefully there's a sufficient number of these to make the "dark start" issue not much of a concern.
I am one of the many that only goes to HN when a major service appears down (usually AWS)
You're not wrong, but any realistic outcome of going in this direction would take decades until it was at meaningful scale. We're more in a "we need to do things now" kind of situation, we should still put some resources towards things we won't have for decades, but that can't be the primary focus.
The entire purpose of an IRC backup is in case shit hits the fan. That means having it run on a completely separate stack.

What use is it if it runs on the same stack as what you might be trying to fix?
In all seriousness there is definitely some poor soul out there stressing their brains out that probably pushed the button to set this all off.

Just a reminder this is not a failure of a single person though and of the organization as a whole and policies in place.
Protocols, Not Platforms
> Google shipped a branch condition that included & rather than && that broke all Chromebook logins

To be fair to C++, that's not the sort of issue that can really be blamed on the language, its unsafety, or its many footguns.

Did they skimp on testing?
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are down, now is a perfect time to Jeet (Jeti)
Anyone remember the 90s? There was this thing called the Information Superhighway, a kind of decentralised network of networks that was designed to allow robust communications without a single point of failure. I wonder what happened to that...?
I had seen that! Do you think it's worth buying & reading the updated version? As much as I loved the original, I'm not sure how much I'd get out of reading a book that's 90% the same content at this point. Though tbf I guess I wouldn't mind just supporting the author so maybe I'll pick up a copy and skim it at least.
"And sometimes the universe says, 'go get a different job already.'"
Negative in my case. It’s functioning properly.
> having them cease to exist without any warning most definitely won't make the world better off.

It may indirectly, in that it may spur a transition to another platform. Most likely, that platform will also be a privacy-invading centralized service, but in an ideal world it would be something like XMPP, Matrix, etc.
And some kind of Medal of Honor.
Krebs just says it's anybody's guess as to whether it's an internal screw up or a hack.
I'm what most people call a FPGA Engineer though I work all the way from boards/silicon to cloud applications. The number of times I've been asked to consult on something in the software world on performance, where the answer to how to do it write was me telling them "rm -rf $PROBLEMATIC_CODE" and then go rewrite it with a good algorithm, is way too damn high. Also, the number of times someone asked me to accelerate something on an FPGA only for me to go implement it run on a GPU in about 2-3 days using SYCL + OpenCL is insane. Sure, I could get another 2x improvement... or we can accept the 1,000x improvement I just gave you at a much lower price.
something about caching
Sort of, yeah. Typically a DDoS attack is done on purpose, this is a side effect of so many clients utilizing retry strategies for failed requests. But in both cases, a lot of requests are being made, which is how a DDoS attack works.
dead beef sounds about right
The poor guy though - he made Zuck blink. And when Zuck blinks, people die!!!
Leave Old Job Off Resume?
I had a blue-collar job about 10 years ago before getting into software. There was some physical pain I dealt with there doing the job, as well as a toxic work environment. After about half a year, I quit. I just didn't show up and did not tell anybody. I regret ghosting them in this way, but there is nothing I can do about it now. After that, I had about a 6-month gap before I found employment in software. So should I put this job on my resume? If so, I'll have only the 6 month gap on my resume, but risk companies calling them to verify employment, and finding out about me ghosting them. If I leave the job off my resume, I have a one year gap on my resume, and risk companies finding about the job anyway through comprehensive background checks. What should I do?
Avoiding things like this is the reason I don't have any Code of Conduct for my public FOSS projects. [1]

The flip side of that is that people need to trust my vision for culture [2] and trust me to do the right thing to build that culture. And of course, I need to vindicate that trust.

There will be plenty of people who don't trust the vision or me, and that's fine. In fact, that's an expression of a free market for ideas, so I want people to be able to choose.

[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2018/11/code-of-conduct-for-yzena/

[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/09/comments-on-cosmopolitan-and...
Lovely.

Safes typically have the instructions on how to change the combination glued to the inside of the door, and ending with something like "store the combination securely. Not inside the safe!"

But as they say: make something foolproof and nature will create a better fool.
What is an autonomous system? – What are ASNs?
Which we should be thankful for, because otherwise they'd be _very_ hard to see as well, and a lot more people would be dying.
The world should do 'a day without facebook' more often.
You mean they don't receive all their alerts through facebook messenger?
AWS Cloud Control Is in for Review
Signal is up - everything seems slow online, though. Getting normal congestion at the ISP level, looks like the side-effects on the web in general are noticeable when facebook goes hard down like this.
See: The Underhanded C Contest.

http://underhanded-c.org/

The whole point is to write C that appears on the level at first, but actually has a subtle exploitable flaw. The flaw is supposed to appear like a simple mistake for plausible deniability. Some of the winning responses are very devious.
Venice, Overwhelmed by Tourists, Tries Tracking Them
And Telegram is extremely slow. Probably the number of new users.
I don't believe you understand the concept of "tenuous".

I have worked in China, China is a totalitarian communist State. There are no tenuous connections between the CCP and Chinese companies, companies ARE the CCP.

For example if you go around China you will see children with a red badge around the neck. This badge represents that the kid is a good student and the kid is forced to wear it.

In China the best students automatically enter the CCP, there is a spy apparatus that controls them once people travel abroad from friends and relatives. If they do something abroad against the CCP they take retaliation against their families.

If you want to create a company in China, you must enter the CCP. How tenuous is that?

People that have not lived there just can't understand what totalitarian means, there is no rule of Law and not free press. The "dictator for life" Xi Jinping can kill anyone in China with no consequences, and he regularly kills competitors or threats to his power.

Having said that, people in charge in the US or the financial elite would love the world becoming their own totalitarian regime, just like China but on the entire world. They lobby for that every day.

Those guys really love power, because they have power, they want more, they want it all like the song says.

It is really nothing new. Just like the Romans wanted to conquer Cartage to own the entire world. Philip II of Spain wanted the same thing conquering Britain, later it was Napoleon, and then Hitler and Stalin.

Now it is the US who would love to conquer China and Russia if they could. Also China would love to expand by force if they could.

The only reason they don't is because nuclear weapons.

The price of liberty for normal people is eternal vigilance.
Commenters have mentioned both Dunning-Kruger and Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is rather strictly defined by its creator in the journalism domain, but perhaps it could be stretched to include the commentary here at Hacker News.

Still, I think that tagging your answer as "amnesia" does not work - unless you, yourself, manage to forget to be skeptical... on topics where you are not expert and commenters are still show-casing Dunning-Kruger.

And it's hilarious how many of them there are here!
If they're restoring from backup that makes sense right? I assume backups are read-only, so deleting messages won't delete them from the backup also. It is sloppy though that you would see anything before the restore was totally done though (including re-deleting messages)
Happy birthday, Dave! She's from meee.
I've said "I've said it before, and I'll say it again" before, and I'll say "I've said it before, and I'll say it again" again.
Yes. It's basically turned every device, especially mobile devices with the app running in the background, into botnet clients which are continually hitting their DNS servers.

I don't know what facebook's DNS cache expiration interval was, but assume it's 1 day. Now multiply the load on the DNS that those facebook users put by whatever polling interval the apps use.

And then remember what percentage of internet traffic (requests, not bandwidth) facebook, whatsapp, and instagram make up.

It's kindof beautiful.
They have this sort of stuff in cities that have enough of a population to sustain these sorts of industries. There is this in my area but its not exactly cheap compared to the price of a late at a cafe:

https://secondhome.io/location/hollywood/
IMO Material only became good around Android 7. When Android 5 was still around, the boilerplate components were all way too big and the information density was incredibly low compared to Holo. Apps were tweaked and around Android 7 did I find them to be actually usable again.

Google Calendar had this issue the worst if I recall. There were these gaudy, colourful images everywhere with cards sliding around and big, friendly buttons all over the place. The design looked pretty great during a quick presentation, but in practice I found it very hard to use the "stream" view calendar properly when I could see two or three events at most without scrolling.
Lichess Android app is also down but not the webpage. Infinity app for Reddit is down. HN is super slow.
The really hard part of writing a terminal emulator, at least from my experience working on Alacritty, is fast scrolling with fixed regions (think vim).

Plently of other parts of terminal emulators are tricky to implement performantly, ligatures are one Alacritty hasn't got yet.
Here's the interview (which I had totally missed btw)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lx5VmAdZSI
And signal

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=Si...
How to Use Twitter for Business: A Practical Guide – Biggist
At this point people hope it will just restart so that we can all resume a normal life. There can only be 2 options. It will be fix very soon or it will be a hell of a night with a lot of coffee.
New Visualization-Based Interface for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I recall Lydia Leong's theory was that the number of big cloud players would be driven by what the ecosystem could support. If you are providing services on top of cloud technology you can't really afford to support more than a hand full of APIs.
Lichess Android app is also down but not the webpage. Infinity app for Reddit is down. HN is super slow and "having trouble serving requests".
Open-source Node.js library to manage multi channel transactional notifications
Also, on a technical level, let's not equate a government apparatus that both controls and records anything and everything you do online, with a government asking a private company to identify people who searched the name of a girl who was murdered.
Is this specifically an issue with the Facebook app? Or is it just a predicable consequence of DNS responses no longer being cached due to query failures for a site as popular as Facebook?
Outage is top story on CNN and Fox. Facebook is not returning their calls. Sheera Frenkel at the New York Times has been able to get a little more info, but not much.

Now Twitter is starting to have problems with overload.
WhatsApp in the replies like "hi". I hate the internet.
In general, access levels are pretty liberal at FB (less so then in the past, but still liberal compared to others)
Ops folks: do you have dedicated networking hardware you can push config changes to as a sandbox of prod? Does Facebook? Do they get simulated or shadowed traffic for pre-prod testing?

My guess is no, but I’ve never really worked in a big DC.
In case of emergency, break glass...

...the doors are glass right?
> Was just on phone with someone who works for FB who described employees unable to enter buildings this morning to begin to evaluate extent of outage because their badges weren’t working to access doors.

https://twitter.com/sheeraf/status/1445099150316503057

Apparently the people planning the heist went a bit overboard with their misdirection.
Recall This Analysis
TITLES | iOS Engineer | Onsite NYC or Remote | Full-Time

Titles is a ~stealth~ storytelling company. We're working on new ways to express, experience, and connect around the topics and interests we love right from our phones. Our team is obsessed with the alchemy of media and technology, designing fresh new mediums for communication, and throwing them out into the world.

We are looking to hire an engineer to help drive development of our iOS application and contribute across product strategy. We are particularly interested in iOS engineers with a love for consumer mobile products and experience in video and audio processing, but all types of expertise are welcome. This role is for you if you are excited about working with cutting edge technologies in the consumer space including video composition, live streaming, and new iOS frameworks.

As the fourth employee of our company you will have an outsized impact on the direction of our product, technology, and team. We’re fresh off of a round of funding and in the process of launching a private beta.

Investors include Betaworks Ventures, Alpaca Ventures, Yes Ventures, Dennis Crowley, Alex Chung, David Rosenberg, Austin Rief, and more.

Reach out to me at parker at titlesnyc.com, or find more details at https://titlesnyc.notion.site/Careers-at-TITLES-fab66472b094....
If anyone can use it for anything other than session storage I'd love to hear about that. Their API is so limited that I just don't understand how can I possibly use it.
It will have been cached at closer to the edge, but once the TTL expires, so does the cache. That means all the DNS requests that would have been served via local caches end up hitting the upstream DNS servers. For a site like Facebook that will be creating an asbolute deluge of requests.
Andecdotal but the whole of the internet feels sluggish atm.
Leaderboards are down, but functional otherwise for me
If only IRC would have been built with multi-server setups in mind, that forward messages between servers, and continues to work if a single - or even a set - of servers would go down, just resulting in a netsplit...Oh wait, it was!

My bet is, FB will reach out to others in FAMANG, and an interest group will form maintaining such an emergency infrastructure comm network. Basically a network for network engineers. Because media (and shareholders) will soon ask Microsoft and Google what their plans for such situations are. I'm very glad FB is not in the cloud business...
Isn’t the answer here if you can’t get someone with keys in a reasonable amount of time to break a window? Most doors have windows adjacent to them, and the company can just call the security people and tell them it’s part of DR.
They're an aging population, yes. The reason so many have vanished is they retired. Why? They were afraid of an economic slowdown brought on by the Covid lockdown would end up with them getting laid off and losing their retirement benefits. So they took the money and ran. Now some of the retirees are being lured back to work as independent contractors. That way they've locked in their retirement benefits and still get to earn wages.
Taiwan reports record number of Chinese planes in defence zone
Is HN hit by something as well? It's loading really slow for me.