What you did/experience last night?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28756663

by aviral • 5 years ago

6 27 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

After the Pandemic, outage of FB, WhatsApp, and Instagram was observed by many of us. I am curious about what happened last night, what did you do or how did you feel about it ?

LandR2• 5 years ago

I didn't know until I happened to read about it on HackerNews.

Nothing in my life changed whatsoever.

aviral10• 5 years ago

Interesting. Is it because you use some other social media ?

LandR2• 5 years ago

I don't use any of the large social media sites. I don't use Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram etc.

I think they all need to die. I don't feel my life is any worse off because of not being on these platforms.

jstx1• 5 years ago

It's better to just ask people about their experience and not to lead them with the question, not to exaggerate and assume they got disconnected from the world, not to call a website outage a global phenomenon. Otherwise it comes across as manipulative - it's like you're telling people what their experience was and only pretending that you're asking a question.

aviral10• 5 years ago

Sure, It makes sense. I will restate it

dalmo3• 5 years ago

I felt some discomfort. It may be time to buy a new pillow.

aviral10• 5 years ago

Haha, try Eiderdown Pillow. I heard they are really nice

beardyw• 5 years ago

Woken by a rain storm. Facebook have denied responsibility.

cpach• 5 years ago

I felt a bit restless but it wasn’t really a big thing for me.

aviral10• 5 years ago

Ya, we still have other options to connect. But one thing I experienced sometime back. These days we don't store contact number as we are connected on Social Media. I had hard time connecting with my old friends. I had to call a lot of other friends to connect with him.

thisistesla• 5 years ago

Drank too much water. Had to get up thrice to pee.

aviral10• 5 years ago

hahaha!! I sent international SMS to friends. Spent money to be online haha

aviral10• 5 years ago

Not for nothing but in many places — including Israel and Palestine — WhatsApp is used as the de facto phone and text messaging platform. Ostensibly, a utility is down right now for millions of people. The billionth reason to break down and regulate Facebook. - Abraham Gutman https://twitter.com/abgutman/status/1445124247005933573

arduinomancer• 5 years ago

I’m don’t really like Facebook but I don’t really get this argument.

How is it facebook’s fault that regular SMS is so bad in these countries that their platform is preferable?

What’s stopping the government from launching their own platform if they want a utility?

And why is it that if you make a product that ends up really popular then suddenly you’re a utility?

sethammons• 5 years ago

Near zero impact on my life. Talked with one of my kids about it for a few minutes and about how we almost did the same thing to ourselves a couple of years back. So last night, I worked an hour or so on a pond I'm rehabbing, watched some tv with the wife, and fell asleep rather early so I could wake up early and work out.

aviral10• 5 years ago

This is so amazing to read that people are doing something interesting other than just being online.

jamil7• 5 years ago

Hadn’t noticed until I read some news about it this morning, I use HN and occasionally reddit. For messaging I deleted Whatsapp this year and use Telegram, Signal and iMessage.

aviral10• 5 years ago

Most of the people in this thread are not using FB social media that is really interesting. Like people have already started making distance with social media and use internet for something productive.

potta_coffee• 5 years ago

I went to BJJ class (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) and had a blast making real friends in meatspace, then laughed when my wife told me about how FB was down when I got home. I gave up on social media years ago, it's toxic trash.

aviral10• 5 years ago

This is so interesting. I think you right there will be turn around and people would love to disconnect and live a offline life.

thorin• 5 years ago

I did wonder whether it might turn into something more significant, but it didn't. I was also curious about how long it would last, as it was quite a long outage.

I mainly contact my ex wife through WhatsApp and a lot of school/ parent communication goes through there. Some of my social groups are organised through fb.

runjake• 5 years ago

I didn't know they were down at the time because I don't use any of it.

mikewarot2• 5 years ago

I was concerned it might have been the quiet start of WWIII, a cyberattack aimed at a chunk of US infrastructure... I was worried Google and the rest would quickly follow in going offline.

I gave it about a 5% chance of it being that, and 95% of a clusterf*ck at Facebook.

coretx2• 5 years ago

The internet is literally designed to survive WWIII. Your concerns about the US infrastructure is not incorrect but a management issue, not a technical one. In case of large scale BGP attacks much will go down but big ISP's like google will simply drop all non rpki routes and naughty neighbours & continue life per usual. Perhaps such a attack should happen as this would force everyone to have their shit in order resulting in the likes of you having peace of mind instead of valid concerns.

mikewarot2• 5 years ago

The internet is NOT designed to survive a war, that's a urban myth. The first thing that would happen in such an event would be the deployment of the stash of Zero day exploits that every major power has saved up for the occasion.

December 7, 1941 was a peaceful Sunday, until it wasn't.

February 26, 1993 was just another Friday, until it wasn't.

September 11, 2001 was just another Tuesday, until it wasn't.

I was only a bit worried, but these type of events have a non-zero probability.

What you did/experience last night?

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