from Hacker News

Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp Outage

by iag on 12/10/20, 10:52 AM with 238 comments

  • by ForTheWin98 on 12/10/20, 4:43 PM

    "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome"

    With Facebook products, you see outages in December and May. Why? Those are the last few weeks to complete your project before your performance review. Miss this window and you find yourself in career trouble. Facebook employees put a tremendous amount of pressure on themselves during these months.

    I would not be surprised if this outage was caused by a bad pull request related to a new project.

  • by florianmari on 12/10/20, 12:27 PM

    It's not only Facebook, a lot of services, Deezer, some operators in France... https://downdetector.fr/

  • by mmccaff on 12/10/20, 11:55 AM

    This red "major outage" status has been reported on their dashboard since at least Dec 2, when an (unrelated to messenger) api bug was introduced that I've been waiting on a fix for.

    It has been surprisingly slow to get a fix or an update.

  • by ourcat on 12/10/20, 3:58 PM

    It looks like they've had issues for a while now. 'December 2nd' ? " Invalid Page Welcome Message for Messenger Destination Ads"

    - The thought of 'ads' in a private messaging app repulses me. I don't use any of these three apps. Mostly since they all require you hand over your mobile phone number. Which then becomes a very powerful 'foreign key'/unique identifier to so many other third or fourth-party marketing databases which might also have it.

  • by iag on 12/10/20, 10:56 AM

    Messenger is currently unusable on both web and mobile.

    edit - reports of Instagram and Whatsapp being affected too:

    https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/10/outages-reported-across...

  • by l1ghthouse on 12/10/20, 12:44 PM

    That explains all the new Telegram contacts :P

  • by speeder on 12/10/20, 1:23 PM

    Wanted to see the probably interesting heatmap in downdetector but... downdetector is down :(

  • by mkl95 on 12/10/20, 1:26 PM

    Whatsapp is extremely dominant in my country, but I keep encouraging friends and acquaintances to install Telegram. As far as I know, there won't be anything preventing FB from geoblocking European users when the company eventually gets in some serious trouble, like it just did in the US.

  • by cecilpl on 12/10/20, 3:58 PM

    The subject of the antitrust suits filed against Facebook came up in a Facebook comment thread for me yesterday.

    Some guy piped up and stated, essentially, that "Zuckerberg is too rich and too big and nothing will happen.". He evidently had never heard of Standard Oil or Ma Bell.

  • by turdnagel on 12/10/20, 5:32 PM

    As of 12:31 PM eastern on December 10, the status page does show "Major Outage," but it had been showing that related to a totally separate Messenger issue since the 2nd.

  • by TLightful on 12/10/20, 12:12 PM

    Excellent new mode. Leave it.

  • by cblconfederate on 12/10/20, 11:50 AM

    Quick, build a competitor

  • by clon on 12/10/20, 1:18 PM

    MS Teams is down for us as well. Possibly a spike related to people looking for a backup.

  • by spzb on 12/10/20, 11:40 AM

    That history graph’s not looking too healthy for the past couple of months.

  • by eric5544 on 12/10/20, 1:03 PM

    Airtable also very sluggish

  • by iag on 12/10/20, 3:07 PM

    Update: looks like most services are accessible again

    https://downdetector.fr

  • by _carbyau_ on 12/10/20, 11:44 PM

    Curious, do these outages affect Oculus users too?

    I am so looking at VR in the near future but crap like this rules certain products right out.

  • by hsuduebc on 12/10/20, 1:13 PM

    Did they publish any info about these incidents? It would be interesting to see where these robust systems fail and how.

  • by WaitWaitWha on 12/10/20, 8:15 PM

    > OH, thank God! - William Preston as Depth Gauge in Waterworld (1995)

  • by georgeolaru on 12/10/20, 11:34 AM

    Back to SMS.

  • by can16358p on 12/10/20, 11:31 AM

    Instagram DMs are also affected.

  • by amelius on 12/10/20, 11:14 PM

    All the more reason to break them up ... No more single point of failure.

  • by rattray on 12/10/20, 1:05 PM

    "But senators, we can't break up these three unrelated services because they all use the same messaging infrastructure!"

  • by xanth on 12/10/20, 11:45 AM

    Yep down for me too.

  • by Triv888 on 12/10/20, 3:32 PM

    They want to show off what would happen if someone else would be hosting them? /s...

  • by cute_boi on 12/10/20, 1:52 PM

    Mark Zuckerberg Outside "Senators see how many lives and business depends on Messenger" ?

    Mark Zuckerberg Inside "Fak how many advertisement money and user data we lost due to this outage."