[outages] Facebook down?

[Jay Hennigan]

On 11/18/10 8:52 AM, John Von Essen wrote:
> I mentioned this to Virendra in that survey that was sent out, but why
> do we feel its important to track facebook being up or down?

Because it is a major portal site used by a large number of people.

Case in point, a few years ago, Yahoo suffered a DDoS attack and was for
all practical purposes unreachable.  "So what, not important"?

Well, it turns out that a substantial number of our customers had Yahoo
set to their home page.  So our support desk was clobbered with calls
(and emails, funny...) thinking that *WE* or *the Internet* was down.

> I find this list to be useful in tracking major IP outages between
> transit carriers. 

As do most of us here.

> It goes directly to my NOC pager and all my NOC staff,
> and many times it has been very useful when people post about an OC-48
> cut for ATT, or an XO outage, then our customers call us about issues
> and we know its not us and their carrier.

It's also very useful when customers call about issues like Facebook
being down and we know it's not us.

> I could care less whether or not Facebook is up or down. Facebook
> doesn't effect the rest of the internet like a Level3 or ATT outage, or
> or fiber cut in NYC.

You and I know that. To a not so insignificant number of our customers,
Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, EBay, or Google are "the Internet" as far as they
know.

> If you go to facebook.com and its down, then yes, its down. End of
> story. They are an endpoint on the internet.
> 
> I'm not opposed to other sites being reported. If Google is down, thats
> big, because Google provides a ton email proxy services. Likewise, the
> post about register.com being down was very helpful because they provide
> core DNS services. These sites/networks effect the internet.
> 
> But facebook is meaningless from an infrastructure/operations
> standpoint, and is a complete waste of time to discuss on this list.

Not completely, IMHO.  I grant you that not every website out there
having a hiccup is worth discussing here.  On the other hand, if there's
a fiber cut completely severing all connectivity to Papua New Guinea and
I don't have any customers there or anyone trying to reach them I don't
particularly rate it high on my individual radar even though it's
infrastructure and an entire country.  So if it's reported with an
accurate subject line I'll skip the notice.  I won't complain that I
don't want to see it here because it doesn't affect me or any of my
customers.

I agree that Facebook is meaningless from an infrastructure standpoint
but disagree that it is meaningless from an operations standpoint.

--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV