It seems this is not some kind of attack. Rather, Facebook took itself down, through a colossal DNS configuration blunder that was made through a web interface at about 1540 UTC today. To make matters more hilarious:
As annoying as this is to you, it may be even more annoying to Facebook employees. There are reports that Facebook employees can't enter their buildings because their "smart" badges and doors were also disabled by this network failure. If true, Facebook's people literally can't enter the building to fix things.
I’m sorry. I’m trying to feel bad about this, but I can’t help but laugh, or at least snicker a little. Apparently with all connections between Facebook and the outside world severed, remote access to their configuration and administration tools is gone, too, and the fallback procedure is for people with physical access to the peering routers to do the reconfiguration locally. The problem is, with the way Facebook has set up their staffing structure, the people who are on site either don’t know how to or don’t have permissions to do the reconfiguration, and the people who do know how to do this and have the requisite permissions are nowhere close to being on site.
A day without Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. It’s hard to imagine, but very quiet and relaxing. I don’t know about anyone else, but someone here is feeling just a bit smug that he still has his typewriter, his Rolodex, and a roll of postage stamps.
Who was it who said, thirty-some years ago, “Somewhere in Gibson’s universe there is a minimum-wage drone who can blow all cyberspace to flinders just by accidentally reversing two punch cards?” Why, golly gee, that was me!
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