Is Facebook closed now? This global outage is hard for everyone
Is Facebook closed now? This global outage is hard for everyone
When something like Facebook takes off from the Internet, there are massive knock-on effects. For example, a website meant to let you know if services are down, called Is It Down Right Now, is struggling mightily under the weight of people trying to see the status of Instagram. Is. . Cloudflare, a company that runs a DNS service (DNS acts like a map for your web browser when it is trying to find a website and is also a potential culprit when it comes to major outages is), reports that it had to mobilize additional resources to be aware of the traffic of people trying to load Facebook (or Instagram or WhatsApp) over and over again.
If you need to check if other sites are down, you still have options. There's the venerable DownDetector, as well as Down for Everyone or Just Me (DFEOJM has informed me that Is It Down's problem isn't just me). I need you all to decide how to split the traffic between these two sites so that we don't crash them too.
In the hacking world, there is something called a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack, where attackers basically pool together tons of computing resources and use them to generate tons of traffic to a website. If they have enough power, the website will be down - and it's quite possible that if it's down now, instead of malicious hackers, it's half the internet accidentally overwhelming the service through sheer combined will. I think this is what happens when Facebook's status page goes down along with the rest of its services.
PS: There's a weird side effect that basically comes from many people using their internet connection only for Facebook - many ISPs and cellular providers, such as T-Mobile, AT&T, and more are also shutting down. has given. Even though their services are working fine, as reported. But because people can't use Facebook, they may assume the problem lies elsewhere.
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