Facebook Went Down

11:30 PM

Today was a day Facebook went offline for around 6-7 hours from 11:30 AM to around 6:00 PM EST. Maybe going offline isn't the right phrase for it, they could have been online the whole time, but no one could connect to their servers. This was due to a network protocol issue, BGP, Border Gateway Protocol. Were they hacked or was there an insider that sabotaged their routing? I'm not a network person, although I did take a networking course and learned the basic network protocols like IP, HTTP, TCP, UDP, and DNS, I don't remember learning about BGP so I don't know much about it.

There really wasn't much that much difference in the world, from what I could see in day to day real life when Facebook went offline. People went on other social media sites like Reddit and YouTube and Discord instead, and crowded those sites. Oh yeah, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus also went offline, so there was lots more traffic on these other social networks. I didn't really miss these services that much though to be honest. I did feel a bit sad that I couldn't reach some Facebook friends otherwise, because I didn't have any other way to contact them besides Facebook.

One subreddit I found the other day was the Herman Cain Award subreddit. It features right wingers who post a lot of anti-vax and conservative content, who get awarded the Herman Cain Award by dying from Covid. It's like the Darwin Award, but it's for anti-vax people. It's so weird how a lot of these anti-vax people are so similar. They are heavily right wing, take the horse dewormer ivermectin, they support Trump a lot, and they call anyone that doesn't agree with them a "lib" or "libtard".

A lot of them are also racist and homophobic, so when they receive the award people post comments like "good riddance" or "the world is better without them." One common meme they have there is the "goatee" meme, because apparently a lot of these award winners have goatees. What I've noticed is that they're all obese or overweight. I don't think I've seen a single thin receive the award, after browsing the awards for hours.

For some reason I watched some Martin Shkreli videos today, he apparently livestreamed a lot of his daily activities, including going on dating websites and browsing Facebook. He's this guy worth $70 million at his peak before he went to prison, and I watched him doing normal everyday things such as making a dating account, writing his profile description, putting photos, flirting online, and browsing Facebook. He was already worldwide famous at the time, and he still didn't get as many matches as I imagined a celebrity of his fame would receive. He was just playing around on every chat though, saying things like "wat it do", to greet women.

He seemed bored. He would give out his personal phone number to people and anyone could call it during livestream. He would get prank calls and other people trolling. Someone even asked him where he lived and he just gave his address out. He didn't care. One of the personality questions for setting up his dating profile asked him if he was "intense" or "carefree", and he picked intense, but he's the most carefree guy. I myself would pick carefree, and yet I would say he is more carefree than me.

Anyway nothing special happened today that I can recall besides Facebook going offline. I didn't talk to anyone today except my parents, and I took out the trash tonight. I did strength exercises today but I didn't go out and walk.

Yeah that was all today.