Facebook - anyone having issues accessing?

cjmcork

have been having problems getting onto it since this pm - anyone else having access issues?

aidan_walsh

Facebook put up a post saying they were having problems with a third party network provider.

Plascebo

Have'nt been able to access it since about 8pm this evening:(

Zatman

Down for me as well:(

clairek6

yup gettiin in very slowly, then cant really get on to any other pages...

puss

Zatman wrote: »

Down for me as well:(

+1

MrStuffins

aidan_walsh wrote: »

Facebook put up a post saying they were having problems with a third party network provider.

Wait..... Facebook are having problems with people accessing their site. So they put up a notice...... on their site?:pac:

Plascebo

Have to talk to the kids now:mad:

Plascebo

MrStuffins wrote: »

Wait..... Facebook are having problems with people accessing their site. So they put up a notice...... on their site?:pac:

That was yesterday evening, no access at all this evening.

purrrfect1

Thats facebook for ya.
I want to see what Mystic Meg has in store for me!

2qk4u

Im on it now,just a bit slow and no chat feature..

Plascebo

2qk4u wrote: »

Im on it now,just a bit slow and no chat feature..

Don't mind the chat, is Zynga poker back??:)

cutymonalisa

No go for me either:rolleyes:

Junco Partner

for the last few days i've been having problems with chat tellin me people were offline when they werent

then today my chat box dissapeared and i couldnt view profiles
and about a half hour ago i cant get in at all

clairek6

no farmville either haha

Blisterman

Oh no!!!! We're doomed!!!!

I've forgotten how to talk to people in the real world!

aidan_walsh

Once again Facebook explain on Facebook once the issue is resolved

TL;DR: **** done gone bad and stuff that was meant to fix it didn't work so good.

Early today Facebook was down or unreachable for many of you for approximately 2.5 hours. This is the worst outage we’ve had in over four years, and we wanted to first of all apologize for it. We also wanted to provide much more technical detail on what happened and share one big lesson learned.

The key flaw that caused this outage to be so severe was an unfortunate handling of an error condition. An automated system for verifying configuration values ended up causing much more damage than it fixed.

The intent of the automated system is to check for configuration values that are invalid in the cache and replace them with updated values from the persistent store. This works well for a transient problem with the cache, but it doesn’t work when the persistent store is invalid.

Today we made a change to the persistent copy of a configuration value that was interpreted as invalid. This meant that every single client saw the invalid value and attempted to fix it. Because the fix involves making a query to a cluster of databases, that cluster was quickly overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of queries a second.

To make matters worse, every time a client got an error attempting to query one of the databases it interpreted it as an invalid value, and deleted the corresponding cache key. This meant that even after the original problem had been fixed, the stream of queries continued. As long as the databases failed to service some of the requests, they were causing even more requests to themselves. We had entered a feedback loop that didn’t allow the databases to recover.

The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site. Once the databases had recovered and the root cause had been fixed, we slowly allowed more people back onto the site.

This got the site back up and running today, and for now we’ve turned off the system that attempts to correct configuration values. We’re exploring new designs for this configuration system following design patterns of other systems at Facebook that deal more gracefully with feedback loops and transient spikes.

We apologize again for the site outage, and we want you to know that we take the performance and reliability of Facebook very seriously.