All hell broke loose yesterday when social media sites Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram were not loading content for their users.
That's when the OG Twitter came to rescue. Users started complaining about this glitch on Twitter and the hashtags #WhatsAppDown #FacebookDown and #InstagramDown started trending.
This global shutdown had a lot of people scratching their heads, and many turned to Twitter for their daily dose of social media interaction. The result also included some hilarity and proof that people can find the humour in anything.
So WhatsApp went down globally for a few minutes and it made headline news.The issue occurred because of a server problem and everyone was quick to get on Twitter or Facebook to ask others if their WhatsApp wasn’t working either. Apparently, people couldn’t send or receive messages using the Facebook-owned app. While the app looks normal, with chats and contacts able to load, but once a user tries to send anything, the app just shows a “connecting” message that never resolves itself or just a one-tick message.Since the fault appeared to be on WhatsApp’s side, people were freaking out. Some even stated that they restarted their phone over and over again until they realised the phone was not the problem. But everything is back to normal as WhatsApp is okay again. Jesus, calm down, everyone.Here are some tweets that were posted while this world crisis was happening:
Can you imagine if Twitter and Google went down at the same time?
People would be reactivating their Facebook accounts and having to sift through conspiracy theory posts about Hillary Clinton still just to figure out what was going on.
Edit: The points on this post keep going up and down every time I check these comments. Yes, it was sarcasm, I was joking, but I was trying to point out that most people rely on a small set of services. "Cloud" has centralized things a lot.
unscheduled outages are always painful and people will always call, I agree. But instant compensation is doing a better job at damage control that a status page. Keeping customer satisfaction even in bad situation is key in a world of high availability expectations. And with a distributed, non partisan metric sourcing about the availability of an API, it's not possible for a Service Provider to lie anymore.
Comments our readers:-
If the outage is at all infrastructure-related, the root cause was something that at some point was local and cascaded. Unless someone git pushed to a repo used by both companies and it's taken all day to get it git revert'd, their redundancy obviously didn't work, did it? There's effectively a category-2 hurricane moving from the Rockies through the mid-west right now.
I’ve seen many systems go down over the last few days worldwide. Aside from the possibility of a mega-DDoS attack (which Facebook denies), all of these organizations have fairly diverse tech stacks to my knowledge. Google’s issue (supposedly) had to do with their Blobstore API, we don’t know what happened with Facebook, and many other, smaller services have had issues as well, including three intranet services at my workplace.
This leaves me wondering what software all these places have in common. The application layers are all different, the databases are all different, the containerization and provisioning systems are different, but I imagine that all these systems rely on two things: the global Internet backbone, and maybe the Linux kernel.
Have there been major security vulnerabilities patched lately in the Linux kernel that could have had unintended consequences?
I have no inside knowledge of this one, but broadly speaking, these sorts of failures can be caused by a change thought innocent at the time to the core software that is then widely deployed using automated systems. If the core's tests didn't catch a real issue in production (and for whatever reason, the rollout happens faster than the regular small-release verification process can catch the error), things can go sour in a way that's expensive to un-sour.
Amazon once pushed a seemingly-innocuous change to their internal DNS that caused all the routers between and within datacenters to drop their IP tables on the floor. They had to re-establish the entire network by hand---datacenter heads calling each other up and reading IP address ranges over the phone to be hand-entered into lookup tables. Cost a fortune in lost sales for the time the whole site was inaccessible.
