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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

How many submissions do we need on this topic?

Maybe I'm jaded because I don't really "get" the whole social network phenomena, but honestly, who really cares anyway? Productivity will (briefly) go up; a few people dependant on FB SSO's wont be able to log into some other pointless services and the internet will continue to function.

I normally down vote people when they say "what does xyz have to do with HN?", but 3 submissions commenting on a procrastination portal being down is really scraping the barrel.

[edit]

I see the submissions have now been consolidated. That makes much more sense. Good work HN admins :)

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If you Google for "www" the first result is Facebook.

For many people, Facebook is how they interact with the web. It's their primary portal for talking with their friends, sharing photos, sending messages, and catching up on news stories.

Calling it a "social network" is like calling Google only a search engine. It's way, way more. And this outage is completely unprecedented. Can you recall a previous time that Facebook has been down? I can't.

I can. Though I do agree that their uptime is amongst the best.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that nobody should care about Facebook being down, and that "a few people" depend on Facebook's SSO.

This has a major impact on a lot of sites, and there are millions of people that do care about Facebook.

It is worthy of a HN submission, although I personally care most about the postmortem to find out what went wrong.

My complaint was actually about the number of submissions rather than it being submitted or that people shouldn't care.

Ok if that was the case, I understand the sentiment, but the words you chose to make that point were badly chosen.

Yeah, very true. I did launch into quite an inflammatory rant.

- "who really cares anyway"

Imagine how many people are locked out of thousands of websites where the only way to sign in and check your order or something is by using Facebook login, which is not working.

I get the same sentiment... who cares... apparently a lot of people if this story can attain over 100 upvotes within 15 minutes.

It will be interesting to read postmortem but as far as "is down" stories go, they should be just auto-deleted from HN

People are excited, since this is one of the core missions and thinking in facebook - never be down, or people will go elsewhere. That's why it's a big deal, not everyday something goes that wrong, especially in something you put a lot efforts in.

Where will the people go? An engineer from Bloomberg was telling me once about their infrastructure, how fault tolerant and highly available it is, they have redundancy everywhere, including power from two different power plants. He said if they were down for few minutes they would be out of business - users of their trading platform would switch to Reuters very quickly. But where will Facebook users go if the site is down for a day? I'm genuinely curious.

It's more of an idea, that if you are not good, people will eventually find better service. Right now, they really can go elsewhere (if you not count bashing on twitter :)), but imagine that facebook downtimes become a norm - eventually there will be a better service.

I also do not use face book and think it is silly. However I think the event is a little interesting. There are thousands of apps that don't even function with out face book.

Many of us who read Hacker News are employed in the technology industry and have a particular interest in reliability and availability of computer systems. It's not interesting that people can't post their personality quizzes, but it is very interesting that Facebook had a production outage, particularly if we are able to learn something from the failure that we can apply to future scenarios we may encounter.

Personally, I use social networks to boost productivity. Facebook is a good management tool for different groups. I have used it to manage people for the last 4 years and it has been the best platform for me to reach everyone. Sad, but true.

I don't understand why people are downvoting this. It's his way, if you dislike, it's not a reason enough to downvote.

It's interesting to HN when any high scalability, high availability service is down.

It's more that they have one of the best records for reliability. Last time they went down was how many years ago? Most sites go down once a month for a few minutes.

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