Cloudflare Explains How Facebook Disappeared from the Internet

The folks at Cloudflare have published a fascinating look into the recent ~6 hour long downtime that the Facebook network went through, taking down not just the Facebook product itself, but also WhatsApp, Instagram, FB’s internal looks, and a lot more. It’s a somewhat technical explanation, but Cloudflare’s Tom Strickx and Celso Martinho have made it very easy to understand.

Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL” because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

Social media quickly burst into flames, reporting what our engineers rapidly confirmed too. Facebook and its affiliated services WhatsApp and Instagram were, in fact, all down. Their DNS names stopped resolving, and their infrastructure IPs were unreachable. It was as if someone had “pulled the cables” from their data centers all at once and disconnected them from the Internet.

How’s that even possible?

It’s really interesting to see how a (possibly) minor piece of code can take down large parts of the internet like this. Honestly, it would be a good thing for the internet overall of Facebook disappears from the internet, but I feel for everyone at Facebook behind this issue. Major hugs to the people involved in bringing the network back up.

Then again, imagine messing up so bad that your boss ends up losing $6 billion.

October 5, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Amazon to Acquire eero

Amazon Press Release:

Amazon […] and eero today announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire eero. eero’s home mesh WiFi systems set up in minutes and blanket every room of a customer’s home in high-performing, reliable WiFi. eero is already delighting Amazon customers with its products and services, as indicated by eero’s 4.6-star product rating on Amazon.com.

eero makes one of the best mesh networking products available in the market today, so there’s no doubt that this is a killer acquisition for Amazon. But it begs the question, “What the fuck is Apple up to”?

Eero was started by ex-Apple employees, and their product language screams the Apple design language and experience. I just cannot fathom how Apple chose to exit this market right as it was heating up, and for a company that screams that privacy is a right, not having a product that handles the home network is a real shame.

February 12, 2019 ✚ Permalink

The Twitterrific Ad Network

Gedeon Maheux, writing for The Iconfactory:

Now you can advertise your app, website, product or service directly on Twitterrific’s expansive network of tech-savvy users for just $100 a month. For that price we guarantee 1,000 tap-throughs – not impressions but actual visits – to your App Store page or website. What’s more, we take care of creating the ad for you ourselves and even provide App Analytics for iOS or Google Analytics for websites.

Twitterrific is one of the most lovingly crafted apps out there, and the folks at The Iconfactory are a bunch of incredibly passionate folks. The ads in Twitterrific are actually something you want to see and work as refreshing change from the usually clutter spreading like a parasite across the web.

If you’re an app developer, you should go check out The Twitterrific Ad Network here.

January 23, 2019 ✚ Permalink

Navi Mumbai is the Fastest 4G City in India: OpenSignal Report

Peter Boyland, writing on the OpenSignal Blog:

Navi Mumbai registered average 4G speeds of 8.72 Mbps in OpenSignal’s latest measurements, which track average 4G download speeds among 20 of India’s largest cities between December and February. Elsewhere, second-placed Chennai saw its 4G speeds nearly double, jumping up from 4.4 Mbps in our last post in March 2017. At the other end of the scale, Allahbad was only city to register less than 4 Mbps with average speeds of just 3.5 Mbps.

Mumbai ranked fifth on that list with an average 4G speed of 6.97Mbps, followed by Hyderabad at 6.71Mbps and Delhi at 6.69Mbps.

March 14, 2018 ✚ Permalink

CloudFlare Launches 3 Data Centers in India

Literally all of the popular iXyr Media websites, including this one, are powered by the amazing CloudFlare architecture. There is tremendous value that CloudFlare gives out for Free and I couldn’t be happier with the product. A few days ago, CloudFlare made this big announcement that has long been my only feature request to them:

India is home to 400 million Internet users, second only to China, and will add more new users this year than any other country in the world. CloudFlare protects and accelerates 4 million websites, mobile apps and APIs, and is trusted by over 10,000 new customers each day. Combine these forces, and we are positioned to connect hundreds of millions of Indian users with the millions of Internet applications they use each day.

Today, we accelerate this momentum with the announcement of three new points of presence (PoPs) in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi. These new sites represent the 66th, 67th and 68th data centers respectively across our global network.

They didn’t just announce a POP in India, they went all out and announced three of them.

As of this moment, our data centers in Mumbai, Chennai and New Delhi are serving all CloudFlare customer content in under 50 milliseconds to users across the entire Indian subcontinent, about 7 times faster than the blink of an eye. And we’re not done yet—we’re still making tweaks to further decrease latency.

As someone whose sole livelihood depends on building and running websites, this is the best thing to happen this year.

December 13, 2015 ✚ Permalink