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Why Browsers Blamed DNS For Facebook Outage

Posted by timothy on from the three-letters-bad dept.

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."

2 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. So what? Big Whoop! by WarpedCore · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    It's an advertisement platform that rides solely on the ignorance if its users. So people had two and a half hours to take a break from their narcissism... this is something worthy of finger pointing?

  2. Re:Not mission critical! by kiwimate · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I suppose if I were an angst-ridden bitter friendless teenager I may have found it amusing too. Luckily, I'm an adult. (How sad that this comment is currently marked insightful.)

    And - really? Genuine panic? I think that says more about the specific subset of Facebook users within your anecdote set than anything else. Or do you also extrapolate out from the frequent racist troll comments on Slashdot?