[outages] Facebook down?

[nevin at enginehosting.com]

On Thursday, November 18, 2010 3:43pm, "George Bonser" <gbonser at seven.com> said:

> The fact is that connectivity to that domain accounts for an increasing
> percentage of end user eyeball traffic and various "spin off" content.
> Those in the business of delivering content to eyeballs know that
> disruption of traffic to the popular content providers are a huge
> complaint generator.  If someplace like twitter or facebook or google is
> unreachable from the perspective of a provider's customers, they are
> going to want to know "is it just me, just my region, is anyone else
> having the problem" so they can get some idea of the scope of the issue
> and have something to tell a customer who might ask about it.
> 
> I don't think it is so much because "it's facebook" as it is "my phones
> are ringing and my customers are calling, is this my issue or a general
> issue" sort of thing.

If connectivity to major content destinations are important to you, your front-line support staff, and your clients, then if you have multiple points of presence yourself monitor those from multiple points.  If not, use places like www.pingdom.com and www.websitepulse.com with global test locations to give you a broader, faster picture then writing to a mailing list and seeing if others can get to Facebook/Youtube/etc.  

The discussion is slightly different if you come to the outage list saying "Hey we are seeing issues connecting to Facebook from Europe/East coast of US, anyone have news on fiber outages, etc."  Then simply opening a discussion with "facebook seems down, anyone else?" as there are free tools, even at both of the mentioned above, and more are out there, that you could use to test if a site is available, and those tests are real-time and free...

We use 3 different 3rd party monitoring systems using global points to test major points in our network infrastructure along with certain key client sites, and a "sample" site on each of our web clusters.  This gives us the reference point so when a client calls saying "My web site is down" we are not simply looking at local monitoring and saying "yup its all up"  As we can show the client that global locations have no issues accessing them, or that we are seeing issues through a certain region and are investigating, you know on lists like this to see if there are any major fiber cuts reported anywhere...

-- Nevin Lyne
-- Founder / Director of Technology
-- EngineHosting.com
-- 888-576-HOST or 612-234-8964