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Bug The Internet Databases Social Networks

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."
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Why Browsers Blamed DNS For Facebook Outage

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 26, 2010 @11:58AM (#33703610)

    It wasn't your browser having a DNS error, it was the user facing servers at Facebook reporting DNS problems talking to whoever they talk to. Maybe when they decided the way to fix the problem was to take down the site, they just removed the back end server cluster from their internal DNS.

  • by chucklebutte ( 921447 ) on Sunday September 26, 2010 @12:57PM (#33703934) Homepage

    With all the adblocking software, no scripting, and other misc Firefox plugins I have no ads from facebook, let alone any other page. Firefox is set to delete cookies and BS on exit and I keep my machine clean with bleachbit.

    Facebook allows me to connect with lots of people I never would see, like buddies in the Army based in Japan for instance or friends in New York etc, etc.

    I hide all the annoying spam adds for peoples stupid farms, I have convinced many of my Facebook friends and family to stop playing those games and to take similar precautions.

    Every company is evil, hell even my Linux distro has political agendas, ( damn Mint Linux!!! ) but what does it really matter? It is the cost of using technology. Until we change our idea about advancing ourselves and not our pocket books nothing will change, so stop with the Q_Q and pew pew, and just deal with and be smart about what you do.

  • Re:DNS? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Sunday September 26, 2010 @01:08PM (#33704022) Homepage Journal

    Notice the page, being served from facebook.com, saying "bad DNS".

    I can understand why that may cause people to think the problem is with DNS. The error message looks like it came from an http proxy. That would suggest that either the user had a proxy configured or facebook were using a reverse proxy. If it was the later, the DNS "problem" would be inside their network.

  • Re:Ageism (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Sunday September 26, 2010 @01:14PM (#33704040) Homepage Journal
    I think that comment was referring to the fact that some recent announcement said there are now 5 billion devices on the internet, and IPv4 supports only up to 3.7 billion devices.
  • Re:I disagree (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kvasio ( 127200 ) on Sunday September 26, 2010 @04:54PM (#33705338)

    Yet, you failed to notice that /. is a site for nerds.
    Many nerds do not thrive to cultivate their social skills.
    Checking their friends status on social network might not be on top of their agendas.
    So: event was notable, but not very important to many slashdotters.

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