Author Topic: Whatsapp App Discussion Thread (Read 447571 times)

Euclid · « **Reply #2620 on:** October 05, 2021, 11:05:59 AM »

Quote from: Dan on October 05, 2021, 10:51:07 AM

So, you're proving my point that something is wrong at FB?
When is the last time that everything consumer facing at Google or Microsoft went down? Versus the several times a year that everything consumer facing goes down at FB?

Not opining about the other outages, I never read their postmortems and I would be talking out of my backside. I'm talking about this specific outage: it's not an architectural issue (though I'll acknowledge that until I read the postmortem I can't be 100% certain).

1) Facebook's technology department is literally a global leader and state of the art (again from deep, personal experience with their tech, e.g. academic white papers and open source projects). So I'm finding very hard to accept that there's something inherently flawed here. I believe strongly that process breakdown and human error was the cause here. (Maybe that's the arrogance you're referring to? That they push things to production without fully testing? But that's a problem in any software in the world - find me a company that doesn't [occasionally] push partially untested code to prod...)

2) (Just so this defense doesn't come off as me being a Facebook fan: I think Facebook is destroying (likely destroyed) our society and I pray that the company is dissolved and shut down.)

yelped · « **Reply #2621 on:** October 05, 2021, 11:06:32 AM »

Quote from: Euclid on October 05, 2021, 10:48:38 AM

Lol outages like this happen all the time at other big tech companies, they're just not as consumer facing so you're not aware of it. For example, Microsoft's Azure has network related outages all the time (talking from personal experience), but they rarely make the news because they don't directly affect as many people.

Very rarely does the entire infrastructure go down. Only parts of it will.

Euclid · « **Reply #2622 on:** October 05, 2021, 01:49:55 PM »

Additional info https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/

stooges44 · « **Reply #2623 on:** October 05, 2021, 02:27:52 PM »

Quote from: Euclid on October 05, 2021, 01:49:55 PM

Additional info https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/

" In the end, our services came back up relatively quickly without any further systemwide failures."

yelped · « **Reply #2624 on:** October 05, 2021, 02:38:43 PM »

Quote from: stooges44 on October 05, 2021, 02:27:52 PM

" In the end, our services came back up relatively quickly without any further systemwide failures."

He means to say that their systems didn't crash from all the messages being delivered and everyone trying to access it at once.

stooges44 · « **Reply #2625 on:** October 06, 2021, 02:39:24 PM »

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/world/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-down-cec/index.html

JlmBoi · « **Reply #2626 on:** October 06, 2021, 02:55:16 PM »

Quote from: Euclid on October 05, 2021, 11:05:59 AM

At the end of the day, the evolving nature of tech makes it more prone to human error than other things. At the same time, it's nature also enables those human errors to have much bigger and swifter repercussions than in other things. Nasty combination.

stooges44 · « **Reply #2627 on:** October 08, 2021, 01:23:32 PM »

Quote

Our generation is struggling to navigate the unprecedented proliferation technological breakthroughs. Yet we are not the first to confront what progress should mean, its impact on how we spend time, and what our ultimate goals should be.

The central story of our Parsha is the “hard reset” that God performed on the world, undoing all that He had created and restarting the world anew. The Torah tells us that Hashem took such a drastic measure because the world had become filled with corruption and moral depravity. The Gemara (Sanhedrin 108a) makes a mysterious comment – “the generation of the flood became corrupt as a result of the great blessing that God had bestowed upon them.” Which blessings are the rabbis referring to and how did they corrupt humanity?

Rav Pam explains, the inventions of the plow and other tools were the great blessing that rabbis referenced. Yet, instead of becoming empowered, liberated, or enriched by these innovations, they became corrupt. These inventions, these gifts from God increased productivity, improved efficiency, and yielded more free time. This time could have been used constructively, productively, and meaningfully. Instead, the generation used their newfound downtime for corrupt activity. The breakthrough and advancement could have brought spiritual ascent, instead they brought moral decline.

Every single day, something is invented meant to make our lives more noach, easier. They are designed to free up precious time. The question is, do they? Do we fill that time meaningfully and mindfully or is that time squandered on mindless behavior? Perhaps it is no coincidence that Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were wiped out and then flooded with messages in the week we read Noach. A reminder that a generation is defined by what it does with the blessing of progress it experiences and the free time it discovers.

Technology can either enslave or liberate, free up or eat up our time, move us forward, or take us backwards. Moments like a worldwide outage can and should be opportunities to consider our own relationship with technology and time.