On 11/18/10 8:52 AM, John Von Essen wrote:
I mentioned this to Virendra in that survey that was sent out, but why do we feel its important to track facebook being up or down?
Because it is a major portal site used by a large number of people. Case in point, a few years ago, Yahoo suffered a DDoS attack and was for all practical purposes unreachable. "So what, not important"? Well, it turns out that a substantial number of our customers had Yahoo set to their home page. So our support desk was clobbered with calls (and emails, funny...) thinking that *WE* or *the Internet* was down.
I find this list to be useful in tracking major IP outages between transit carriers.
As do most of us here.
It goes directly to my NOC pager and all my NOC staff, and many times it has been very useful when people post about an OC-48 cut for ATT, or an XO outage, then our customers call us about issues and we know its not us and their carrier.
It's also very useful when customers call about issues like Facebook being down and we know it's not us.
I could care less whether or not Facebook is up or down. Facebook doesn't effect the rest of the internet like a Level3 or ATT outage, or or fiber cut in NYC.
You and I know that. To a not so insignificant number of our customers, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, EBay, or Google are "the Internet" as far as they know.
If you go to facebook.com and its down, then yes, its down. End of story. They are an endpoint on the internet.
I'm not opposed to other sites being reported. If Google is down, thats big, because Google provides a ton email proxy services. Likewise, the post about register.com being down was very helpful because they provide core DNS services. These sites/networks effect the internet.
But facebook is meaningless from an infrastructure/operations standpoint, and is a complete waste of time to discuss on this list.
Not completely, IMHO. I grant you that not every website out there having a hiccup is worth discussing here. On the other hand, if there's a fiber cut completely severing all connectivity to Papua New Guinea and I don't have any customers there or anyone trying to reach them I don't particularly rate it high on my individual radar even though it's infrastructure and an entire country. So if it's reported with an accurate subject line I'll skip the notice. I won't complain that I don't want to see it here because it doesn't affect me or any of my customers. I agree that Facebook is meaningless from an infrastructure standpoint but disagree that it is meaningless from an operations standpoint. -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV