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In the mid-1980s, I was witness to an incident where an upgrade to the SS7 software used in AT&T's long distance network took most of North America's long distance service down hard for more than twenty-four hours. It was then that I began formulating what came to be called Pinkston's Law: MOST OUTAGES BEGIN AS UPGRADES

Over the years since, I have seen this happen so often that whenever I hear of a major telecom or data service outage, my first thought is, "Must have been an upgrade. Pinkston's Law." In the vast majority of cases it turns out that that's exactly what it was! So, at the urging of those closest to me, I've started this blog to chronicle the occurrences of Pinkston's law whenever I hear of them.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Facebook worldwide outage

Facebook was down worldwide for a half hour, and it was widely suspected to be due to a DDoS attack on the popular social media site. But - as usual - it was Pinkston's Law at work. Here's an official spokes-droid's statement:

We ran into an issue while updating the configuration of one of our software systems. Not long after we made the change, some people started to have trouble accessing Facebook. We quickly spotted and fixed the problem, and in less than 30 minutes Facebook was back to 100% for everyone. This doesn't happen often, but when it does we make sure we learn from the experience so we can make Facebook that much more reliable. Nothing is more important to us than making sure Facebook is there when people need it, and we apologize to anyone who may have had trouble connecting.

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