After taking a pause last Thursday in recognition of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, here are a few of the tech stories I’ve found interesting over the last several days… including a Facebook outage you may have heard about.
Facebook Suffers Massive 6 Hour Outage
On October 4th, all of Facebook’s services went offline. This includes the Facebook website, app, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, as well as services that rely on Facebook, like the Facebook Ad platform, services that allow Facebook login, etc. It was nearly 6 hours before the company was able to restore its platforms.
According to Facebook the problem was caused by an incorrect configuration change that made it through a system that was supposed to prevent a bad change from being implemented due to a bug. Facebook uses technology called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) within its data centers, which is unusual, and a bad configuration change took Facebook down.
The short version is that the internet is not one network, but rather a series of interconnected networks. Those networks talk to each other through a networking technology called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. Facebook uses BGP to connect its data centers with the internet, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that the company uses BGP for communication within their data centers. The company even posted to it’s engineering blog in may about this, and claimed that while using BGP inside the data center was extremely complex, they had safeguards in place to ensure issues did not occur, or stayed isolated if they did occur. That….. obviously didn’t’ happen. The botched configuration change appears to have deleted the Facebook’s BGP routes to the internet. Essentially, Facebook deleted itself from the internet’s address book, so the rest of the internet couldn’t reach Facebook’s data centers. That was the short version.
The problem took so long to fix because Facebook was unable to fix the problem remotely. It required engineers physically going to the affected networking equipment and fixing the problem. Except that there are reports that Facebook employees weren’t able to use their ID cards to access Facebook facilities, since they ran on Facebook systems, which were inaccessible. It was a mess.
There is going to be a lot of fallout from this. As maligned as Facebook is, Billions of people use Facebook services every day, and this outage shows just how important a few large companies are to our daily lives. I expect to hear more from Facebook in the future, and how they plan to prevent something like this from happening again.
https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/
YouTube Will Ban All Vaccine Misinformation
Google has announced that YouTube will ban all vaccine misinformation content going forward. Previously, only COVID-19 specific misinformation was banned. The company will not ban first hand accounts, so if an individual has a bad reaction to a vaccine chooses to share that on YouTube it will be allowed, but widespread misinformation will no longer be allowed.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22700171/youtube-vaccine-misinformation-antivax-ban
Microsoft Officially Releases Windows 11
Normally this would be the kind of thing that would get its own coverage, but Windows 11 is, in many ways, a non event. Windows 11 is the next major version of Windows, and is now generally available, technically.
Windows 11 is mostly a visual refresh of the Start Menu, Windows Store, and Settings panel. There honestly really isn’t anything exciting in Windows 11, and it feels like an incomplete product. This is likely due to the fact that Windows 11 seems to have come together in just a few months, with only 3 months of public testing. Many features originally announced for Windows 11 are not yet ready, and the public won’t see them until next year.
Perhaps the biggest story of Windows 11 is that most people likely won’t see it for quite some time. In contrast to Windows 10, Microsoft is not pushing users to upgrade, and in fact says that most users will not see Windows 11 offered to them to update until mid 2022. Windows 11’s system requirements also mean that many people with a PC that is more than about 4 years old will not be offered Windows 11 as well. Microsoft has arbitrarily set the system requirements to be an 8th generation Intel Core processor, 2nd generation AMD Ryzen processor, as well as a TPM security chip. My primary desktop PC, for example, does not qualify for Windows 11. Ask me how happy I am about that.
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-11/257678/windows-11-review-fresh-familiar-incomplete
USB Implementers Forum Gives Us Logos Instead of Making Things Simple
Earlier this year the next version of the USB specification was published, allowing up to 240W of power in a USB-C cable. This is a good thing, and should allow many kinds of devices to use USB-C for power that currently can’t. However, because we can’t have nice things, not all cables are required to be able to carry that much power. So we could have a cable running at USB 4 speeds that doesn’t support 240W, and a cable at USB 3 speed that does. Instead of making this simple, we are getting logos on the cables that will tell us.
Samsung is Removing Ads from its $1000+ Smartphones
My last 3 smartphones have been Samsung phones. I’m currently wearing a Samsung watch. I think they make great, if not perfect products. But one thing that has bothered me, and many other people, was the prevalence of ads through Samsung apps on their phones. Samsung Weather, Samsung Health, and more featured large banner ads at the top of the aps, which feels wrong on smartphones that can, at times, cost over $2000. Earlier this year, the company promised to remove ads from first party apps on its phones, and on October 1st, updates to Samsung apps started rolling out that removed ads. I see it on a couple of my Samsung apps, but not all of them yet.
https://www.engadget.com/samsung-removes-ads-pay-health-weather-203218433.html?src=rss