skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt it was them, though think it's worth watching since Facebook will definitely have a post-mortem. If it's not DDoS/security related, then it would be kind of embarrassing for Lizard Squad (which is why I'm surprised to see them claim it). For example, Facebook's last major downtime was caused by a main database failure – nothing to do with any vulnerabilities:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/more-det...

Edit:

I'm guessing the multiple services going down at once has to do with Akamai. It seems like there's some speculation about the storm on the east coast and their Boston datacenter.
Startup Founders Called Her ‘Hot’
Facebook back online in SF as of 7:09 GMT
Right, natural gas is a good alternative. Base load power and cleaner burning.

But that is an entirely different proposition to subsidising purchase and use of solar panels at above-market rates.
Yes, this is my argument. But understanding day to day things doesn't need atomic level details. For most things your measurement precision matches a model at a much higher level. You can stop at Newton's or Einstein's equations whenever that fit's your view of reality.

People use that to extrapolate in the other direction, and assume that because Newton's laws can be simulated, you can simulate an atom, thus everything. We don't have a view of reality at subatomic levels that says: "this is it and there's nothing beyond it". You don't know if your simulation of a brain will show an emergent intelligence if simulated with 'float', 'double' or 'infinite'.
> I share the same fingerprint as everyone else using the same browser with JS disabled

That's not a lot of people who have JS disabled.
Looks like cdn or part of their network routers failed, because mobile apps for instagram and facebook work fine
Check out fastmail. Very similar experience for mail and calendar.
Back up now. Will be good to read the postmortem on this one.
Facebook seems to be back online for me.
I'm impressed with the authors efforts, and share much of his pain when it comes to doing weird things with C.

For other obfuscated fun, see this poem/tree printer in 505 bytes[0], or this program:

main(G){10<putchar(11^--G?89-(0x1F&2846984999544829581>>5*G):10)&&main(2+G);}

[0] - https://github.com/lelandbatey/tiny_tree_printer
Seems facebook is back. a total of 55 min or so.
Not with everyone constantly refreshing
Breaking News Facebook and Instagram Are Down
Seems like they are back up now. 100% HA is a myth, for even those who can afford it.
As of 11:12 PM PST Facebook and Instagram are back online.
Ok they're back for me in Alberta! What a wild ride. I pooped everywhere.
Facebook is back up
We can live our quality life happily again.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you seem to think that fresh pasta is "normal pasta made fresh", therefore it's "better" -- but that's not true.

Fresh pasta is technically a dough; it's made with eggs. Dried pasta is made of durum wheat only. Fresh pasta tastes completely different and won't just work in any dish; works best for the more delicate dishes such as Alfredo.
Experimenting on Humans – A/B Testing at Wix
Yeah..instagram too!
Back up for me again
I think it's also about leverage. If they do end up using Google's tech they'd get a better deal if they're in a less desperate position.
Hikikomori are also well "networked" online and play the game of who is authentic and who is fake. Perhaps it is as popular as it is because it has become an identity.
thy browsing at work be done
I can get back on; able to see posts from hours ago, noting within 5 hours-ish. Anyone with an ops background able to give a JS eng who has no ops experience like myself a glimpse into what bringing services back online like that looks like? No experience with ddos mitigation techniques
I've placed those on pause while learning how to code.
http://teichopsia.svbtle.com/
http://www.leanpub.com/quantummadness
Props to their oncall team!
The woman who swapped home for a hut near Chechnya (BBC)
Paul Graham: Let in the programmers, but not the lawyers, bankers, doctors
(The following mostly applies to C#.)

> Objects containing the same values should be equal by default.

Sounds good, but it's a tricky issue. Equality must be checked between all values of both objects. This can take long, as objects can have many values and may contain references to other objects which may in turn contain references to other objects and so on. Object references might even be cyclical. Not impossible to account for but quite tricky.

And how about get/set properties? These must be checked as well, even though many will be just "mirrors" of private or protected properties, and others might be calculations based on other properties (like the area of a circle).

> Comparing objects of different types is a compile-time error.

Accounting for inheritance, I assume.

> Once created, objects and collections must be immutable.

This sounds like a terrible idea. Wouldn't objects be to even modify their own properties?

> Objects must always be initialized to a valid state. Not doing so is a compile-time error.

> No nulls allowed.

Nulls are useful. The problem here comes from not knowing whether something may be null or not. The solution would be only allowing Nullables to be null, and enforcing anything that's not a Nullable to be initialized.
Looks like a classic Stack Snowverflow error to me.
Annd it's back up again
Down here (Central America)
Yeah, lets see "Blizzard Squad" try this when all of the east coast isn't trapped inside.
>It's almost as if fb has become a public utility or something.

Well thats what Zuckerberg answered a user to the question "Why Facebook wasn't cool anymore". He didn't want it to be cool , but more like a digital utility like water or electricity
I mean, like, WOW. If they have done this we all must give them props for ambition.

Forget Sony. Nobody outside of hollywood bigwigs were impacted by that. But Facebook? The US government is going to go nuts. I hope lizardsquad are driving drone-proof cars.

Facebook is now back online for me on my home connection (BC Canada) and every Tor node I try. Either the attack is over or FB has fought back.
It's Up and Running. All the websites are accessible now.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like a DoS since facebook was reachable and serving error pages, and instagram was reachable and serving blank pages. It _does_ seem like an intrusion or other security incident though because I'd be surprised to learn that instagram shares lots of critical infrastructure with facebook. It seems more likely that someone hit the panic button for both sites.
Simple Bayesian analysis says it is them as they do not have a record of lying. Why would they? There is nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Attempting to Revolutionize the United States Navy
Yeah, normal access patterns to FB are already pretty much as big as a DDOS on a regular website
Site Reliability Engineers
Or if you are looking for something more secure in means of eavesdropping: http://www.techspot.com/article/896-secure-email-and-cloud-s...
That was LetsBuyIt.com, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1122354.stm
But if you are increasing energy prices for things like solar subsidies, then you are making poverty worse. There is no avoiding that.

I'm not going to comment on all your other suggestions - that's not the point I want to make. That point is - making poor people pay more for electricity so that rich people can get a rebate is just wrong. There is no justification for it. To fix things, first you have to stop making them worse.
Looks like they're back online
Deist - the latest physics makes the universe reek of being a programmer's hackjob. An impossibly narrow hard coded Dark energy constant, holographic principle (need I say more?), probabilistic phenomena coming together to create an illusion of deterministic order (a mask for runtime code injection, or just convoluted Rube Goldberg programming if not). If the inflationary multiverse is proven and people continue to claim anthropic survivor bias I still won't admit defeat - I'll just say that the multiverse is a for-loop. Something put the monkeys at typewriters, and if our addled grey matter can be considered sentience I'm pretty sure that magnificent something can fit the bill of intelligence as well. Sorry, but what more can a mortal say/comprehend?
A lightweight, superfast business rule system in Java
LS have claimed responsibility for other services too though - HipChat, for example. It's unlikely all would suffer from internal issues at once.

Though, as has been said before, anyone can claim responsibility. We'll soon see.
Nothing to gain? Taking down Facebook seems like something that would bolster their rep significantly. If they think they can claim credit for it and get away with it, then there seems to be little reason why they wouldn't.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see if Facebook makes any public statements as to what the cause of the outage was.
Site Reliability Engineer. It's a Google (+Facebook)-specific title that is sort of like a sysadmin or devops, but instead of keeping the system up, they write code that keeps the system up. They also have a different negotiating position vs. engineering than in many other companies, eg. SREs have veto power over many architectural decisions in the code, and it's more "we'll build the system that can stay upright with a minimum of pagerstorms" vs. "you build the system and throw it over the wall to us and then we'll keep it upright through our self-sacrificing heroism."
"We produced a product that was never, ever going to pay for itself in the hopes that it would convince a bigger company to give us all stable jobs and/or a truckload of cash so we could stop pretending that this boondoggle was sustainable. And it worked! We're so happy!"

"Oh, you...you used the product? Wow. Sucks to be you."

Any time you hear a startup guy talking about their "exit strategy," understand that this is what they mean.
2048 desktop source code
The NSA sees all. Using both a VPN and Tor is more suspicious than just using Tor.
I wasn't even getting DNS resolution for any of the affected sites.
FreeBASIC definitely has moved away from QBasic compatibility, I don't think it's considered a focus at this point. The last SDL versions of QB64 are fairly impressively compatible IMO, a large chunk of QBasic programs work without too many modifications. You can also now use the compiler via the command-line if you're interested. Back when I was doing some more "serious" QB64 development, I use a regular IDE and shell'd out to QB64 to compile, rather then typing in the QB64 IDE itself. It has it's share of rough edges though, so it is what it is.
Milk or cream were not in the original carbonara recipe.
Apple hires SREs who are actually sysadmins that occasionally code, complicating the title somewhat. This is not unique to them.

nostrademons's explanation of SRE is the correct one, IMO. The architecture is key. Engineering has to be built to allow that. It has helped me in the past to say SREs are concerned more with the operation of a service than a group of machines offering a service; it's almost like a service operations developer. When a company thinks in terms of services and abstracts the machine away, i.e., containers, scheduling, Mesos, Omega/<unnamed>, intelligent CI/CD, service discovery, now you're getting into SRE territory instead of SA territory. The architecture involvement distinguishes SRE from devops for me. You should be able to trust SRE to build services, not just run engineering output.

Teams that congeal out of Xooglers tend to preach SRE well, and there is the occasional company (Twitter and Foursquare come to mind) that applies the title and interacts with the team as intended.
How does simple Bayesian analysis suggest that? :-)
Yes, it's exactly the fallacy of relative privation.
Some sort of security incidence does seem more plausible than a DDoS, although I can't think of what would affect Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Hipchat, and AIM simultaneously. I'm also having a hard time imagining what sort of security incident would result in Facebook deliberately shutting down their web presence, even for a few minutes. And all of the other potential attacks, such as DNS or CDN, seems like it a) wouldn't affect everyone simultaneously, and b) wouldn't even work because sites like Facebook don't have a single point of failure, there's always backups and backups for the backups.
> they could cause a large enough DDoS to affect the
> massive juggernaut that is Facebook

You don't need to send Facebook more traffic than it normally gets, you simply need to nail a pain point, and cause an unusual traffic event.

There's (I assume) no chance that it's been done using Slow Loris, but that's a good example of doing something unusual to deplete a resource in an unusual way.

I would tend to agree that it's unlikely Facebook have simply been flooded off the internet, but there are many other ways to perform much more targeted DDoS attacks, and presumably Facebook haven't mitigated against _all_ of them.
Or Facebook is just that important. We will never know for sure.
Well, in the case of the real world currently, usually wealth came first. It came first because you can inherit wealth in various forms: either through land, money or even education. Parents being able to afford a way better education for their children offer them far more than those who don't.
replying as breadcrumbs so I can reference this remedy later.
> seems like something that would bolster their rep
> significantly

And then irretrievably kill it if they were shown to be lying.
You get the info that you're looking for if you do

whois =facebook.com
The weird thing about license plate scanning is that basically anyone could do it, and there's no obvious way to stop it. Any group of ordinary citizens (including private businesses) could create a distributed network of license plate scanners by installing devices in their cars and around their houses/buildings.

It would be an interesting act of protest to track the movements of powerful people, so as to compel them to take privacy more seriously.
Good point. Although I'd say that any such attack like that is still unlikely to cause the entire site to become instantly unresponsive (or to serve static error pages as other people have suggested; personally, I just never got the site to load). And similarly, it would not be expected to come back to normal operating behavior a few minutes later. So yes, I'll grant you that you can DDoS even large sites without needing pure brute traffic, but it still doesn't seem particularly likely here.
on desktop as it is on mobile.
Um, snowstorm?
Are HipChat also down for you?
As the title says, are HipChat also down for you?
The Perils of Lazy Pluralism (Should Harvard Divinity School Still Exist?)
I spent a bit getting it to work on OS X. The ASM becomes:

movq $0x2000004, %rax ; // BSD syscalls are divided into classes.
movq $1, %rdi ; // 64-bit registers use %rdi instead of %ebx
lea message(%rip), %rsi; // Relative Address of message
movq $13, %rdx ; // Same Length
syscall ; // x86-64 ASM syscall

movq $0x2000001, %rax ; // Exit Syscall
movq $0, %rdi;
syscall

message: .ascii "Hello World!\n";
What happens if one of the five employees loses their key? Aren't you increasing the risk of bricked coins with each signature that you require? Do you really want your coins to be at risk of brick by three or five CoinBase employees?
Maybe you could fix the libxslt problem by using a pool allocator for the nodes. The pool would contain only the nodes, and you could use the offset in the pool as their ID, rather than the full virtual address. Just some food for thought.
Update from Facebook:

"Current State: Fix Pushed

Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight from 22:10 until 23:10 PST. Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilize. We don't expect any other break in service. I'll post another update within 30 mins. Thank you for your patience."

https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/39399836411226...

Might not be a hack! Might just be weather in Boston:

"Akamai (provider for FB, Instagram and so on) claims to be down due to power outage. #LizardSquad claims to have hacked them. Get popcorn."

https://twitter.com/petterkarlsson/status/559975340526014464
One of my all time favorite games. The humor was for my taste, much better than Monkey Island (which wasn't bad).
Let me ask you this: how does a species survive that doesn't have offspring unless they were VERY comfortable and secure in their lives? It doesn't. There are many natural urges humans possess and this is one of them.

If you ask a person why they did it they often can't explain it in a reasonable way. To them it just feels like the correct decision, because evolution makes having offspring very desirable. Same reason why most of the things that taste delicious are the things you need most for survival (energy from food).
Tangentially related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
International Business Machines is a stack of paper registered out of Delaware. The fact that people are employed by this stack of paper does not mean the stack of paper has a soul.

to prove this, note that their stock was up on the rumor of 110k layoffs. Other stacks of paper without souls caught wind of this stack of paper reorganizing, and promptly bought shares.
Scrape Websites for Data Extraction
HipChat – Major XMPP outage
Coinbase and others including Square, and pretty much any other Payment Provider that offers accounts with no physical signature card use id validation services that generally pull information from your credit report in the form of validating questions to answer and potentially a color coded range of your credit score (getting the actual score results in a "hard" credit hit.) These do not reflect on your credit report and are referred to as "Soft credit checks." You would get much more explicit warning if it were not as required by law. These types of blanket statements cover the soft checks. The action they are referring to is terminating an account with an active bankruptcy or failing an OFAC or PEP (politically exposed persons) check.
Directly related to the planet name generation routine, if you look closely - the same tokens are used there (although that's not all of it). Part of this legacy carries over to the sequels, even the recently-released Elite: Dangerous, although the "old worlds" are patched in by hand along with a bunch of discovered stars.

A small side-effect, however: Bell & Braben had to try several galaxy seeds in Elite before they happened upon one that didn't generate the planet Arse!

Lots of things of the era did things like this, of course. 8-bit BASICs would often tokenise on input to reduce memory consumption and the amount of lexing needed during the interpreting.

Even as late as the PlayStation, similar things were still very common practice: take a look at the English translations of Final Fantasy 7 through 9, or Chrono Cross, for excellent examples of the type of thing, which (if I recall correctly? It's been a few years!) don't use ASCII (but map to offsets in the tilesets), use control characters to handle colours and the like, sometimes have digraphs and in the case of Chrono Cross, due to a lack of disc space (caused by English text being bigger than Japanese text of an equivalent meaning), the localisation team got highly creative and made an accent engine for the 44 or so different characters so that quite a lot of the lines could be reused and changed on-the-fly (as the 'developer ending' documents).
Yeah, all 3 services are up: http://webandtechs.com/2015/01/facebook-and-instagram-are-do...
And short version for those who don't care to dig through that:

He discovered a bug in a software written in Perl, yes, but almost everything else in his talk is wrong and while he talks with a lot of confidence he knows almost nothing about Perl.

I'd written more about that earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909150
For comparison, the cost of downtime for a single oil rig is on the order of $100 per second. Petrobras, as an example, operates 70 rigs and has a market cap of $125 billion. Facebook has a market cap of $216 billion.

(source for cost: Cormorant Alpha shutdown in 2013)

Edit: misplaced parenthesis => my first number was way off, $70 000 vs $100. Redid analysis, made mental note not to do math before coffee intake.
... because they haven't reached five nines? Because your own privately hosted authentication system will?
In Asia Facebook isn't that big, they also have other social services
I do not believe that advisors should receive equity in a startup. If these are knowledgeable+experienced businesspeople, then they likely do not need the small amount of equity proposed in the article.
Additionally, if an advisor wants a monetary benefit then they should invest monetarily.
Ultimately, I believe that the nature of an advisor-advisee relationship is something that shouldn't be based upon a payment. When one person takes time to help another without any personal benefit, we see more excitement, more passion, and more humanity behind the help given. The startup that I've been working on has benefitted greatly from mentorship that did not come at a price, but resulted in mutual respect and appreciation.
Ever read IBM & The Holocaust [1]?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
So first, economy in Japan sucks, there is not that many jobs and houses to go around. Also problem is not just depression, but shame and lack of alternatives. And hikomori also affects women at large scale.

Japan (and any Confucian culture) shames people who do not accept their traditional roles. Men are expected to work until they fall dead. Women are expected to take care of children (while optionally following career at the same time). This sort of works in closed system, where people do not really know about any alternatives.

But with internet everyone can see that ordinary western people live happy lives, without working themselves to death. I bet most hikimori just want to live western way. Go to nice college, have a few parties, eventually graduate and work 9-5 job. This is simply not an option in Japan, with its elite schools and work culture.

'Saving those people' without providing better alternative is a nonsense. They are already on path they are most happy with. Shaming and dressing it as mental illness is not going to work.
Yes if you can avoid saying anything, fine. In the case of the bomb threat kid, there is no way to verify an alibi of "I was looking for drugs using Tor". And, a nervous seeming kid finally admitting he was looking for drugs fits pretty well and may have gotten the investigators to move on. They've limited time and resources.

At other places, like border crossings, you might not have the ability to refuse to say anything (especially as a non citizen). Being able to have a good cover may be the difference in being let go after a cursory look versus being detained for in depth examination.

And I really cannot imagine counter terrorism agents bothering to actually go forward charging that kid with attempting to buy pot or something. After all, if they suspect him off terrorism, that alone should be enough to get a search warrant and take his computers.
There's a public service announcement for hikikomori:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc
This, strangely, is in English.

Support website for hikikomori: http://www.newstart-jimu.org
$400 per second is about $13 billion per year
What is the connection between Tinder and Facebook?
Official update: "Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage tonight from 22:10 until 23:10 PST. Our engineers identified the cause of the outage and recovered the site quickly. You should now see decreasing error rates while our systems stabilize. We don't expect any other break in service. I'll post another update within 30 mins. Thank you for your patience."
https://developers.facebook.com/status/issues/39399836411226...
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