Ongoing Facebook API Outage Worries Developers. Can the Web Depend on FB? | Hacker News Reader

Ongoing Facebook API Outage Worries Developers. Can the Web Depend on FB?

nytimes.com

32 pointsjfi13 comments

Since this was my group's bug (search infrastructure), I can shine a little light.

"Ongoing" is in the article title, but the actual glitch started Thursday night and continued into Friday morning. The title also makes it sound as though the entire Facebook API was broken; to clarify, we were returning stale results from stream search for several hours due to a software issue. This impacted clients like, e.g., kurrently.com or http://likebutton.me/?q=Bieber ; you would see results from the start of the incident, rather than up-to-date ones.

We've resolved the software issue, and put alerting in place to ensure that we notice sooner. In the future, if you depend on Facebook stream search and notice a flagrant failure like this, feel free to tell me about it: kma at facebook.com

I don't suppose the platform team has a platform status RSS feed or twitter account anywhere? It'd be nice to know about any and every issue occurring in the platform.

There's the Facebook platform page here and its matching twitter account, but they're not really what you're looking for, are they? Some of my colleagues in platform are probably reading this; I'll ask around at work tomorrow.

http://www.facebook.com/platform http://www.twitter.com/fbplatform

Not quite, yeah. I'm looking for something more along the lines of http://status.twitter.com/, specifically for the FB platform. thanks!

Btw, pity you folks aren't looking for PMs in Seattle right now. I'd love to apply :)

Is this more helpful?

http://developers.facebook.com/live_status

Yes! I'd love to see the Graph API stuff integrated in there, too, though, but I bet you guys are already doing that :)

There are two issues here, and your post only addresses what Facebook is doing about one of them. The issues are:

(1) The fact that the API went down for an extended period of time. The post addresses this issue.

(2) The fact that, according to the article, there was no official communication from Facebook about the issue for quite some time, even once they presumably knew about the issue and were working on fixing it. If Facebook wants to power web logins, this is an organizational/process issue that they must fix.

What, if anything, is Facebook doing to address issue (2)?

The whole point of the web is that it's decentralized. It shouldn't be dependent on Facebook or any other site. Obviously, that extreme is impractical, but it's something to strive for.

It's good to see the poor stability of the Facebook API starting to get some more public attention. Much of the downtime that top Facebook apps have is due to the platform itself and developers are often powerless to do anything about it. It's disappointing to see that platform stability is still bad even though Facebook has been at this for nearly 3 years.

Works as designed -

"A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." — Leslie Lamport

Sure see a lot of complaints about Facebook and the App Store these days. Maybe the whole "walled garden" thing isn't as great as it seems.

(Insert analogy about a walled garden where everyone brings their cows to pee. The grass is now greener on the other side of the wall..)

Last week an email went out to a lot of big wigs in my company with over the top complaints about some features not working on my software. I was annoyed and kinda bummed. Now I am just glad it didn't make it into the NY Times.

To be succinct: Obv not.

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