Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are all down due to a BGP configuration error. Instagram and Facebook are currently not working, as are democracy, and a healthy sense of self. Enjoying an Internet without Facebook. If only for a little while. Sent from ProtonMail for iOS
Also experiencing this. Curious on details. Doesn't democracy go up when the social media AI markets go down?
They're back in the building now, diagnosing things. Other services are misbehaving across the web, here and there. Mainstream news is writing as if the outage will be multiple days, but describing a scenario that usually resolves in a day or two in my damaged-intuition: https://www.newsweek.com/internet-outage-live-updates-facebook-whats-app-amo... 16:10 PM EDT Facebook employees couldn't access building, communications platform amid outages As widespread outages plagued Facebook and some of its apps Monday, the company's employees couldn't access their internal communications platform or even enter buildings. Sheera Frenkel, a technology reporter for the New York Times, tweeted Monday afternoon that she had spoken with a Facebook employee on the phone. The worker told her that the employee badges that allow them to enter the company's buildings weren't working, preventing them from even being able to examine the extent of the disruption. It was not clear if the issue has since been fixed. Facebook's internal communications platform, Workplace, was also down Monday, the Times reported. As most of the company's workers were left unable to do their jobs, two described Monday as a "snow day."
6:08 EDT media reports facebook is back. some people say they can use it. many saying it is still not working. dns resolution fixed but page displays errors on login. other services, instagram, whatsapp also having errors reported. I feel like grarpamp but with fewer links.
hello Karl, another unsigned reply, because HTML. i can submit separate deatched signatures if you like. (maybe useful as an exercise anyway... :) ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Monday, October 4, 2021 10:51 PM, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
6:08 EDT media reports facebook is back. some people say they can use it. many saying it is still not working. dns resolution fixed but page displays errors on login. other services, instagram, whatsapp also having errors reported.
more information about the outage: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/ [PRN_cold_storage2] By [Santosh Janardhan](https://engineering.fb.com/author/santosh-janardhan/) Now that our platforms are up and running as usual after yesterday’s outage, I thought it would be worth sharing a little more detail on what happened and why — and most importantly, how we’re learning from it. This outage was triggered by the system that manages our global backbone network capacity. The backbone is the network Facebook has built to connect all our computing facilities together, which consists of tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables crossing the globe and linking all our data centers. Those data centers come in different forms. Some are massive buildings that house millions of machines that store data and run the heavy computational loads that keep our platforms running, and others are smaller facilities that connect our backbone network to the broader internet and the people using our platforms. When you open one of our apps and load up your feed or messages, the app’s request for data travels from your device to the nearest facility, which then communicates directly over our backbone network to a larger data center. That’s where the information needed by your app gets retrieved and processed, and sent back over the network to your phone. The data traffic between all these computing facilities is managed by routers, which figure out where to send all the incoming and outgoing data. And in the extensive day-to-day work of maintaining this infrastructure, our engineers often need to take part of the backbone offline for maintenance — perhaps repairing a fiber line, adding more capacity, or updating the software on the router itself. This was the source of yesterday’s outage. During one of these routine maintenance jobs, a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity, which unintentionally took down all the connections in our backbone network, effectively disconnecting Facebook data centers globally. Our systems are designed to audit commands like these to prevent mistakes like this, but a bug in that audit tool prevented it from properly stopping the command. This change caused a complete disconnection of our server connections between our data centers and the internet. And that total loss of connection caused a second issue that made things worse. One of the jobs performed by our smaller facilities is to respond to DNS queries. DNS is the address book of the internet, enabling the simple web names we type into browsers to be translated into specific server IP addresses. Those translation queries are answered by our authoritative name servers that occupy well known IP addresses themselves, which in turn are advertised to the rest of the internet via another protocol called the border gateway protocol (BGP). To ensure reliable operation, our DNS servers disable those BGP advertisements if they themselves can not speak to our data centers, since this is an indication of an unhealthy network connection. In the recent outage the entire backbone was removed from operation, making these locations declare themselves unhealthy and withdraw those BGP advertisements. The end result was that our DNS servers became unreachable even though they were still operational. This made it impossible for the rest of the internet to find our servers. All of this happened very fast. And as our engineers worked to figure out what was happening and why, they faced two large obstacles: first, it was not possible to access our data centers through our normal means because their networks were down, and second, the total loss of DNS broke many of the internal tools we’d normally use to investigate and resolve outages like this. Our primary and out-of-band network access was down, so we sent engineers onsite to the data centers to have them debug the issue and restart the systems. But this took time, because these facilities are designed with high levels of physical and system security in mind. They’re hard to get into, and once you’re inside, the hardware and routers are designed to be difficult to modify even when you have physical access to them. So it took extra time to activate the secure access protocols needed to get people onsite and able to work on the servers. Only then could we confirm the issue and bring our backbone back online. Once our backbone network connectivity was restored across our data center regions, everything came back up with it. But the problem was not over — we knew that flipping our services back on all at once could potentially cause a new round of crashes due to a surge in traffic. Individual data centers were reporting dips in power usage in the range of tens of megawatts, and suddenly reversing such a dip in power consumption could put everything from electrical systems to caches at risk. Helpfully, this is an event we’re well prepared for thanks to the “storm” drills we’ve been running for a long time now. In a storm exercise, we simulate a major system failure by taking a service, data center, or entire region offline, stress testing all the infrastructure and software involved. Experience from these drills gave us the confidence and experience to bring things back online and carefully manage the increasing loads. In the end, our services came back up relatively quickly without any further systemwide failures. And while we’ve never previously run a storm that simulated our global backbone being taken offline, we’ll certainly be looking for ways to simulate events like this moving forward. Every failure like this is an opportunity to learn and get better, and there’s plenty for us to learn from this one. After every issue, small and large, we do an extensive review process to understand how we can make our systems more resilient. That process is already underway. We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making. I believe a tradeoff like this is worth it — greatly increased day-to-day security vs. a slower recovery from a hopefully rare event like this. From here on out, our job is to strengthen our testing, drills, and overall resilience to make sure events like this happen as rarely as possible.
Facebook are currently not working, as are democracy
Democracy even more of a sick joke trap played than Facebook. 6+ Billion crackheads around the globe addicted to both of them. So very sad.
and a healthy sense of self. Enjoying an Internet without Facebook. If only for a little while.
It's an app, uninstall that shit.
there was a report recently that a huge number of apps are somehow uploading data to facebook's servers without facebook being installed
it looked legitimate to me but I do not have a link and could have been in an altered state of mind. would be interested in trying to dig it up if anyone values the potential factoid more than as an unverified viewpoint.
hello Karl, reply below without signature, as it is embedded HTML: ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, October 5, 2021 12:57 PM, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
there was a report recently that a huge number of apps are somehow uploading data to facebook's servers without facebook being installed
it looked legitimate to me but I do not have a link and could have been in an altered state of mind. would be interested in trying to dig it up if anyone values the potential factoid more than as an unverified viewpoint.
see: https://hackernoon.com/how-facebook-tracks-you-on-android-even-if-you-dont-h... How Facebook tracks you on Android (even if you don't have a Facebook account) Suppose you’ve picked up an Android phone on the street and you saw the 4 apps above. Can you guess the profile of the phone user? Your guess is likely to be that the user is a ‘she’, her religion is Muslim, perhaps looking for a job recently, and she’s either a mother or someone who is into virtual cats. Yes, in essence, that’s how Facebook profiles you if you own these apps in your Android phone. Now, let’s talk about the ‘how’. Cut to the chase - Facebook is able to track you because Android developers of 3rd party apps (example: Indeed Job Search) implement Facebook’s Software Development Kit (SDK). - SDK is a collection of tools that eases the creation of software. By using Facebook SDK, developers can do advanced analytics without the need to code it from scratch. SDK is like a Swiss Army Knife. With it, you can start your job immediately instead of having to build your own scissors, knife, corkscrew etc. - This article is written based on the research conducted by Frederike Kaltheuner and Christopher Weatherhead. You can watch the full video [here](https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9941-how_facebook_tracks_you_on_android?ref=hack...). The official study can be found [here](https://privacyinternational.org/node/2475?ref=hackernoon.com). Purpose of this article I wrote this article with the end in mind to educate the general public on how these tech companies collect our data and how we can protect our digital privacy. My job is to “de-jargonise” the research, not to be 100% technically accurate (although I will do my best to be). Just a head’s up, I am not an expert in the data privacy domain; I just consider myself more of an intermediate developer. So if you have detected any technical inaccuracies, please point it out and I will send you a 💌. Outline - Anatomy of the Google Play Store - How the tech works (without going too much on the tech) - What’s our defense? Anatomy of the Google Play Store According to [Privacy International](https://www.privacyinternational.org/report/2647/how-apps-android-share-data...), research done by the University of Oxford has suggested that approximately 42.55% of the free apps in the Google Play Store could share data with Facebook. [image] Out of the 42.55%, this study picked 34 apps, based on the fact that they have either a huge number of installations, or they involve sensitive information such as religion and health, or they are simply utility apps (You know, torchlight, QR code scanner, fart sound etc). [image] Here’s a zoomed-in version. Found any app that’s installed on your phone right now? Out of the 34 apps, over 61% of them automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app.
“…the moment a user opens the app”. That means, there is no chance for the app to ask permission from the user to grant/deny the sharing of personal data.
How the tech works (without going too much on the tech) App #1: Kayak Take Kayak for example. If you are unsure what’s Kayak, it’s a travel metasearch engine. It allows you to search for flights, hotels, and cars if you are going on holiday. Action 1: You tap on the application icon. What happens: The application is initialized and the following data is sent to Facebook immediately. [image] The highlighted word “anon_id” stands for anonymous id. Basically, you are identified as XZdfd5f00f-9271–4e82-a8ce-6cea1d38b6d3. Facebook does not know your actual name, and that doesn’t matter. There’s a term for that; it’s called shadow profiling. It’s comical to know that Kayak confidently declares this message “Don’t worry, we’ll never share anything without your permission” at its login screen even though it shares data the moment you open the app. In Kayak’s defense, the SDK is built by Facebook, so Kayak should not shoulder the entire blame here. To be fair, Kayak no longer shares data instantaneously with Facebook as of this writing. [image] Action 2: You search for a flight with 1 economy passenger from London (Gatwick) to Tokyo on the 2nd December, returning on the 5th What happens: The search is initialized and the app sends the following to Facebook. [image] In a span of a minute or two, Facebook took notice of this random person who wants to travel from London to Tokyo in December and he’s traveling alone. This data is harvested from a single person with a single device at a single search. Imagine you close the Kayak app and switch to (say) “Amazon”. Facebook knows that you have these 2 apps and it will probably start to put you into categories like “preparing for holiday” or “affinity for winter clothes”. The bottom line is that Facebook harvests billions of data points every single day, even from users who made a conscious effort to stay away from Facebook. That’s how creepy it is. What’s our defense? Stay in a cave. I’m joking. Well, half-joking. The best defense is, of course, getting yourself off the internet. That means, no Facebook, no Google search, no YouTube, don’t hang out with friends who love to take selfies, and buy airline tickets at the booth. But we all know that that’s kind of impractical at this day and age. But there are certain ways to limit the reach of these tech companies into your personal life. Here are 5 suggestions. 1. Reset your advertising identifier (Very simple) Every device has an advertising identifier (aka ad id). You can’t stop Facebook or Google from tracking you but you can make their tracking difficult by frequently resetting your ad id. If you reset it, in theory, Facebook and Google algorithms will view you as a different person in your next online activity. Android Phone: Go to settings > Google > Ads > Reset advertising identifier iPhone: Go to settings > Privacy > Advertising > Reset advertising identifier 2. Limit ad personalization (Very simple) In theory, this should limit the amount of data collected by the companies. However, this study showed that we can end up sharing more data to companies if we limit ad personalization. But I will not go into the details of that. Android: Go to Settings > Google > Ads > Opt Out of Personalized Advertising iPhone: Go to settings > Privacy > Advertising > turn on ‘Limit Ad Tracking’ 3. Review permissions (Very annoying) Did you notice that apps these days have been asking for permissions before you carry out a simple task like importing a photo or opening a map? Yeah, it’s irritating but it’s crucial. This allows you to have greater control of your privacy. Not perfect, but at least it helps to a certain extent. 4. Use Brave browser to surf & use DuckDuckGo to search (Simple) [Brave](https://brave.com/?ref=hackernoon.com) (as opposed to Google Chrome) is a web browser which focuses a lot more on data privacy. [DuckDuckGo](https://duckduckgo.com/?ref=hackernoon.com) (as opposed to Google Search) is a search engine which distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users. 5. Educate yourself / your parents / your children on how the Internet works (Not so simple) Education is the most powerful weapon. There are tons of articles and YouTube videos explaining how computers and network works; go read them up. However, if the content is too complex, especially for the older generations and the newcomers (aka your children), you can check out [Potato Pirates -Enter The Spudnet](https://www.potatopirates.game/enter-the-spudnet?utm_medium=link&utm_source=Hackernoon&utm_campaign=androidprivacy&ref=hackernoon.com). It’s a board game that’s developed to teach cybersecurity and internet piracy without computers. Closing Remarks After the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, people are starting to take notice of the importance of digital privacy and the government has been implementing measures after measures to curb the big companies from being overly intrusive in terms of data collection. One prominent move is the implementation of the [General Data Protection Regulation](https://eugdpr.org/?ref=hackernoon.com) (commonly known as GDPR) in the EU. It basically sets a compliance framework that companies need to comply with. While it’s heartening to know that the government has made progress to protect us, we need to do our part as well. I hope this article is useful to you. Do drop me a response if you would like to discuss this topic further.
thanks. sounds like it's a service-as-a-software-substitute situation with a shared user identifier in corporate libraries.
hi coderman facebook went down while they were blocking you. it's back up now but we can probably take them down again if we let their algorithms cause more mass panic. kind of like bitcoin: profit competes with exposure.
"... The best defense is, of course, getting yourself off the internet. That means, no Facebook, no Google search, no YouTube, don’t hang out with friends who love to take selfies, and buy airline tickets at the booth. .." This is what I keep telling Batshit, Gramps and Some-itch. On Wednesday, 6 October 2021, 02:57:05 am AEDT, coderman <coderman@protonmail.com> wrote: hello Karl, reply below without signature, as it is embedded HTML: ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Tuesday, October 5, 2021 12:57 PM, Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
there was a report recently that a huge number of apps are somehow uploading data to facebook's servers without facebook being installed
i'm getting less and less rational and will be trying to take a break from posting again. thank you all for your tolerance.
participants (6)
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coderman -
grarpamp -
Karl -
professor rat -
Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 -
zeynepaydogan