I've learned the same lesson, and why things like ping checks aren't enough. Even just a WGET of the front page isn't enough. You need the monitor to login and replicate at least part of the user experience if you have a complex setup. It's very embarrassing when someone tells a user "shows it's up from my side." and they're relying on a naïve monitor.

It amazes me how most smartphone apps- which operate in a wireless environment of likely flaky connections, don't seem to be tested or designed at all to handle loss of connections. They tend to just become non-responsive or do erroneous things like play the first second of an audio file and then auto-pause, without reporting any errors.

Yeah, but at least it's a bit understandable that its changed in that direction, and usually you can get a developer-friendly error message if you look at the HTTP responses in the devtools.

I remember one time a company I worked at received a support message where the title was (paraphrased) "DONT HURT MY CHILDREN" from some person who saw an error message saying something about "couldn't dispose of child" or something similar, when the frontend broke. "Child/children" being kind of common in programming, I'm sure others faced similar scenarios.

I'm not sure if they were genuinely scared or just decided to have some fun with us while reporting the issue, but after that we made the error messages even more generic, so nothing could be misunderstood.

I guess it is this quest to not alienate the lowest common denominator that is the reason behind the stupidification of error messages. On one hand, people won't get scared, on the other hand, people get less context about why the error happened in the first place.

Wonder how many of the average users actually care?

There are so many microservices everywhere with different teams responsible, that if just one team doesn't forward errors properly it is messed up.

My first thought was that I'd been hacked as well...

I have gotten 4-6 "here's your facebook reset" type emails over the last month. All unrequested. I've always assumed they're casual attacks (mostly interested in seeing if my password can be stuffed into another, more valuable account)

I really hate that companies do this. PayPal does it sometimes, too.

MAC Address being flagged?

But on the flip side, I was able to create a back up profile in a different VM on this machine.....

Already got a call from someone who regularly gets caught in unprompted xfinity password reset loops saying “it’s happening again.”

Inexcusable to catch people in a reset loop during a login outage, and not confirm which password is the current one.

Yeah, and they've dug themselves a hole with having near permanent login persistence. I can't remember the last time on a computer I use frequently that I've had to log in.

Yup - same here...

I fear my initial attempts to 'reset my password' and getting that same security(at)facebookmail.com email with the SAME reset code, have not helped me - if only I'd been asleep, I probably could have slept through it.

At least Insty came back up - though to be honest I cant remember that password either and now terrified to try and recover or change that now too!

Me too, after the first couple of "is it down" websites I tried failed to load.

HN never fails us when a big website is down.

I was also almost ready to reset my password.

There are quite some harsh comments here below. You can't plan for every possible failure point, who knows what part of a system/infra out of everything that they have went down and triggered this behaviour. Some things you just can't catch/predict. Especially in huge systems like theirs. I would expect people here to understand things like these and not just call people names for something like this, we all know things seem simple/clear from the outside, but the job of debugging and fixing something like this take quite some effort.

You are absolutely correct. That would be a much better experience.

That said, getting there strikes me as pretty challenging. Automatically detecting a down state is difficult and any detection is inevitably both error-prone and only works for things people have thought of to check for. The more complex the systems in question, the greater the odds of things going haywire. At Meta's scale, that is likely to be nearly a daily event.

The obvious way to avoid those issues is a manual process. Problem there tends to be that the same service disruptions also tend to disrupt manual processes.

So you're right, but also I strongly suspect it's a much more difficult problem than it sounds like on the surface.

Well you can't expect to hire engineers with half a brain for the pitiful compensation Meta offers, can you?

There was for a brief moment. I got that once

It would be a better UX, but, depending on the outage, that might be a really hard behavior to guarantee.

Not the worst thing that a bunch of Facebook users are resetting their passwords.

> My FB password is 96 bits from /dev/urandom in a GPG-based password manager I wrote for myself a couple decades ago.

We have the same approach to password management!

don't bother. fb's forgot password flow is broken too.

Strictly speaking, just because there's an outage does not mean you're not pwn'ed.

The password reset flow was broken too. And I got logged out on every device. My friend who works there said they can't login either.

downdetector reports has gone down but to me is still bugged out, been catching a livestream on youtube all along though, meta stocks are back up from the dip so I take it some regions are restored to normality

Discord is also having issues.

That's the natural endgame of the "user-facing services must not stop, if something they depend upon stops, they must only degrade" philosophy.

Pro tip: in chase meta actually got hacked, it would be good idea to not use that password on any other websites, change them immediately.

On a psychological note, I think the threat detection part of our brain doesn't always notify our conscious thought that it's actively monitoring for threats. I've often noticed that when I'm carefully handling a hot frying pan then my ringing phone is more likely to startle me than usual.

If we get huge surge of "Uncommitted" votes to Biden as we did in Michigan, you can argue this can cause significant pressure on him and might even lead to his ousting...

Social Media is very successful in Get Out the Vote campaigns for younger people - who typically vote for one party disproportionately.

Facebook and other social media platforms have played somewhat of a role in the 2016 election, for example. Meta has been under a lot of pressure for that, compare e.g. this recent Instagram change: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/continuing-ou...

I can't get into the US-local conspiracy-mongering, but I'm not sure how you've missed social media becoming a hot-spot for election-day information/misinformation?

Shutting down social media has gone to the top of the list for regimes either "attempting to fabricate positive election results" or "attempting to combat the spread of misinformation about elections".

More sympathetically, for better or for worse (definitely the latter) there will be people trying to look up election information ("what are my local polling hours", "who is on my ballot") on social media websites, who will now not be able to be guided to the correct information.

Messenger is often used to coordinate logistics among friends. I would not be surprised if a Meta disruption lead to at least momentary confusion if someone was planning on carpooling. Not to mention it messes with "get out the vote" posting.

I'm not very conspiracy-minded but this does smell a little weird.

At the very least, "there's a big event in the country of one of our biggest userbases, maybe hold off on risky deploys until tomorrow"

The primaries are pretty well decided, so I suppose the conspiracy would be "trial run".

Actually I can see this morphing into a Russia interference conspiracy.

If the main social media used by liberals goes down, while the one used by Trump (forgot what it's called) stays up, surely that is an advantage for him?

Not relevant to the primary election in any way, but this has been more than annoying to me already.

We have a small livestock operation, and won an online auction late last night for a pig about four hours away. Facebook was the only listed means of contacting the person, and we were planning on driving to pick it up this morning.

Now I get to re-arrange my day today to deal with that, and will probably have to take a PTO day from work to drive there later in the week.

Real businesses are in fact impacted by Facebook being down - including those not based around Facebook and that you might never expect.

Did they imply anything as ridiculous as needing facebook to vote? The implication is merely that everyone would otherwise have been talking about voting and the results, ie, simply higher than normal traffic. (I'm not sure it would be that much but that was the reasonable interpretation of the comment.)

I agree with the first part but the second is taking it too far. Plenty of people use Facebook messenger for communication about semi-important things. Not seeing how that would affect the primaries but it is not jsut for vacation pictures.

So... No way it could be DNS?

For some reason I couldn't browse the home page but I could still access my messages (website).

And the Quest headsets.