Why Browsers Blamed DNS For Facebook Outage 96
Julie188 writes "That was probably the only time 'DNS' will ever be a trending term on Twitter. The cause was Facebook's 2.5 hour outage on Thursday, which incorrectly told users trying to access the site that a DNS error was to blame. In truth, experts who've read Facebook's explanation say the site went down because Facebook gave itself a distributed denial-of-service attack when a system admin misconfigured a database. So why was DNS blamed? The 27-year-old communications protocol has been known to cause other, somewhat similar outages."
Ageism (Score:5, Informative)
The 27-year-old communications protocol
So? TCP/IP is 36 years old.
Re:DNS? (Score:3, Informative)
http://rs79.vrx.net/works/photoblog/2010/Sep/23/ [vrx.net]
Notice the page, being served from facebook.com, saying "bad DNS". Think about that
for a second.
There WAS some DNS issues too ! (Score:4, Informative)
The confusion might have come from the fact that when I looked, there seemed to also be some DNS problem.
Basically, when asking directly, the servers that are authoritative for the zone were giving me a CNAME for the 'ANY' query, but not the associated A records, which it should, since the CNAME was pointing to a host name within the same authority. At this point, any sensible resolver stops asking !
This only lasted for a little while though - so it might have been a glitch or possibly a deliberate action related to how they were trying to fix the underlying issue itself - possibly averting traffic until they actually solved the actual problem.
--Ivan
Re:Ageism (Score:2, Informative)
What does IPv4 have to do with DNS? (hint: nothing. Modern DNS servers support IPv6)
Re:Did Facebook have an internal DNS failure? (Score:4, Informative)
It didn't fail, they turned it off. This was the easiest way to "shut off the entire site" as their post-mortem describes. The DNS errors users saw were being generated by the front-end HTTP proxies, not by client browsers, which caused most of this confusion. Once the database issue cleared, they reactivated the DNS entries for the back-end servers one cluster at a time and the site came back.
Re:They get no monies from me! (Score:1, Informative)
You won't find it on the home page. It was a post by a developer on the dev blog. He later removed it and apparently moved it to his personal blog.
Palestine Written by Clem on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 @ 12:34 am | Main Topics
This is not the place to talk about this but I am deeply touched by what is happening over there. I feel disgust and guilt with us passively witnessing it and our money and weapons supporting it. I don't want to use my name or this project to push my own ideas about this but I spend a lot of time working and giving away, sharing and receiving to and from a lot of people.
I'm only going to ask for one thing here. If you do not agree I kindly ask you not to use Linux Mint and not to donate money to it.
I hope for these people to be able to live decently in the future and for me not to have anything to do with the misery they're in at the moment.
I promise not to talk about this anymore. I don't want any money or help coming from Israel or people who support the action of their current government.
Thank you for your understanding. This is very important to me.
I disagree (Score:1, Informative)
It is the most used website in the world (more userhours/month spent of Facebook than any other site), the fastest growing internet community (when measured in new users/month), etc... And as such it is an engineering masterpiece (in software engineering and probably in several other areas, too). When it goes down for several hours, it is a newsworthy event.
For us who work for advertising agencies, FB downtime is also a financially notable event.