YouTube turned off flash player as the default in 2015, and VP9 was supported in Firefox at the same time.
YouTube still serves h.264, vp9, and av1.
I was trying to figure out what this could be referring to.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19815348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28495546
Does anybody here remember enough keywords to find it out ?
Edit: I guess it was this Twitter thread https://mobile.twitter.com/johnath/status/111687123179245568...
Edit 2: The associated HN thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19662852
The problem wasn't some web server, it's the Firefox backend services running on GCP.
Lay with the dogs, wake up with the fleas.
Google is a shitty company producing shitty products. When you select to do business with Google you select to do business with a shitty company producing shitty products and treating its customers like shit. Hence I fail to understand the Surprised Pikachu face when something like this happens.
I don't think that's as bad as you try to make it... if the client says it supports something then it breaks when it uses it, it's the fault of the client, not the server.
Google literally wrote the books on SRE. For them to not know better is absurd.
It might (as mentioned in TFA) have made them think to run some extra tests, which could have caught the bug. But it also would have made the response faster, as they would have known what changed far sooner.
When you do Operations for a living, the only thing you can expect is the unexpected. That's why even after you think you've tested a change, you carefully and slowly roll it out a bit at a time, monitoring golden metrics so you can detect a problem, stop the roll-out, and roll back.
It sounds like somebody just flipped a giant switch and never checked error rates, connection metrics, anything. Check out this graph: https://hacks.mozilla.org/files/2022/01/crashes-foxstuck2-20... Think maybe that would indicate somebody needs to roll back the last change?
The problem here, as usual, is a disconnect between stakeholders. Google has this service (it seems like the load balancer for their customer?) it wants to change for one reason or another. The customers may or may not have planned for the change Google is making. Google makes the change, but it isn't a stakeholder of the customer (they basically don't care what happens to the customer). So there is no direct feedback loop for the customer to tell Google something is wrong.
If Google was at risk of losing business from its customers going down, it would have a strong relationship with those customers and have a way to quickly help diagnose problems and roll back changes if needed. This is a great lesson for all customers to take away: don't depend on people who you don't have a close relationship with.