Facebook’s Big Outage—Understanding the Internet’s Complex Machinery

At 15:51 UTC, we detected a significant issue: “Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL.” This error suggested that our DNS resolver, 1.1.1.1, might be malfunctioning. However, the situation was more serious than we initially thought. Social media was abuzz with activity, and our engineers confirmed that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram were all experiencing an outage. It appeared as if these platforms had been abruptly disconnected from the Internet.

This was not a simple DNS problem; it was a sign of a much larger issue. Facebook later revealed that a change in their internal configuration had caused a widespread disruption, affecting not just their services but also the ability of their staff to restore normal operations.

Delving into BGP

BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, is a critical component of the Internet’s infrastructure. It’s the system that allows the Internet’s routers to communicate and determine the most efficient routes for data to travel. Essentially, BGP is the Internet’s GPS, guiding data packets to their destinations. If a network like Facebook stops using BGP to announce its presence, it be-comes invisible and unreachable on the Internet.

The Ripple Effect

At 15:58 UTC, we observed that Facebook had ceased announcing its DNS routes. This meant that DNS resolvers, which are the Internet’s directory assistance, could no longer find the IP addresses for Facebook’s services. As a result, attempts to access Facebook. com and similar domains failed.

This failure triggered a chain reaction. With no resolution possible, DNS resolvers world-wide began to experience an unprecedented surge in queries, as both automated systems and users repeatedly tried to access the now-unavailable services. This surge not only strained the DNS infrastructure but also affected other online platforms as users sought information and alternatives.

The Interconnected Web

The day’s events underscored the Internet’s complexity and the delicate balance of systems and protocols that keep it running. It’s a vast, interconnected ecosystem that relies on mutual trust, standardization, and collaboration among its various components to serve nearly five billion users globally.

The Resolution and Beyond

By 21:00 UTC, we began to see signs of recovery as BGP activity from Facebook’s network resumed. This activity peaked at 21:17 UTC, indicating that Facebook was actively work-ingtorestoreitsservices.By21:20UTC, the DNS for “face book. Com” was once again avail-able on our resolver, 1.1.1.1, and by 21:28 UTC, it appeared that Facebook was back online, with DNS functioning normally.

While Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram may have taken some time to return to full operation, the incident served as a stark reminder of the Internet’s interdependence and the importance of robust infrastructure.

Fifty years after Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter was released to widespread critical disgust, how have views of it changed?

“To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” wrote the German theorist Theodor Adorno, suggesting in his 1949 essay Cultural Criticism and Society that artistic expression had been rendered inadequate as a tool to understand reality after the Holocaust. In her 1974 film The Night Porter, Italian director Liliana Cavani challenged this theory, taking it to its logical extreme. She used a concentration camp as the setting to explore a crazed sexual bond between an adolescent prisoner and an SS commandant, and how, years later, this psychological poison has pervaded their souls.

Amid the furore after its release — which included intensely negative reviews and an at-tempted ban by the Italian ratings board—with typical nonchalance, Cavani told The New York Times: “This is nothing compared to the numberless couples who tear each other apart psychologically.”

Half a century on, however, does The Night Porter still seem like a provocation that plumbs the depths of bad taste? With the film’s recent restoration and re-releases, as well as renewed conversations around cinematic depictions of the Holocaust, many have revisited the film and remain unimpressed by its content. Others are perhaps seeing the film more as Lili-an a Cavani originally intended: as an artistic reflection of how sexual obsession can be fascistic in its tunnel-visioned ferocity. Cavani herself put it more simply: “love comes always with a price to pay.”

The Night Porter is set in Vienna in 1957, where a former Nazi commandant, Max (Dirk Bogarde), works in an upmarket hotel. There, he clashes with former SS colleagues who are determined to purge themselves of any shame about their roles in the Final Solution and eliminate any surviving witnesses. Max, however, would rather forget his past and move on, living his life quietly, he says, “as a church mouse.” His careful world is upended when Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), now married to an American composer, walks into his hotel lobby — the very woman he sexually abused while she was a prisoner in his camp, and with whom he entered into a sadomasochistic relationship. Reunited once more, their twisted folie a deux resumes and a fervent debasement begins — now, on both sides.

How can one person enjoy good health, while another person looks old before her time? Humans have been asking this question for thousands of years, and recently, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to scientists that the differences between people’s rates of aging lie in the complex interactions among genes, social relationships, environments and lifestyles. Even though you were born with a particular set of genes, the way you live can influence how they express themselves. Some lifestyle factors may even turn genes on or shut them off.

Deep within the genetic heart of all our cells are telomeres, or repeating segments of non-coding DNA that live at the ends of the chromosomes (染色体). They form caps at the ends of the chromosomes and keep the genetic material together. Shortening with each cell division, they help determine how fast a cell ages. When they become too short, the cell stops dividing altogether. This isn’t the only reason a cell can age — there are other stresses on cells we don’t yet understand very well — but short telomeres are one of the major reasons human cells grow old. We’ve devoted most of our careers to studying telomeres, and one extraordinary discover y from our labs is that telomeres can actually lengthen.

Scientists have learned that several thought patterns appear to be unhealthy for telomeres, and one of them is cynical hostility. Cynical hostility is defined by high anger and frequent thoughts that other people cannot be trusted. Someone with hostility doesn’t just think, “I hate to stand in long lines”; they think, “Others deliberately sped up and beat me to my rightful position in the line!” — and then get violently agitated. People who score high on measures of cynical hostility tend to get more heart disease, metabolic disease and often die at younger ages. They also have shorter telomeres. In a study of British civil servants, men who scored high on measures of cynical hostility had shorter telomeres than men whose hostility scores were low. The most hostile men were 30% more likely to have short telomeres.

What this means: aging is a dynamic process that could possibly be accelerated or slowed — and, in some aspects, even reversed. To an extent, it has surprised us and the rest of the scientific community that telomeres do not simply carry out the commands issued by your genetic code. Your telomeres are listening to you. The foods you eat, your response to challenges, the amount of exercise you get, and many other factors appear to influence your telomeres and can prevent premature aging at the cellular level. One of the keys to enjoying good health is simply doing your part to foster healthy cell renewal.

In the late nineteenth century, art critics regarded seventeenth-century Dutch paintings as direct reflections of reality. The paintings were discussed as an index of the democracy of a society that chose to represent its class, action, and occupations exactly as they were, wide-ranging realism was seen as the great accomplishment of Dutch art. However, the achievement of more recent study of Dutch art has been the recovery of the fact that such paintings are to be taken as symbolizing mortality, the renaissance of earthly life, and the power of God, and as message that range from the mildly moralizing to the firmly didactic. How explicit and consistent the symbolizing process was intended to be is a much thornier matter, but anyone who has more familiarity than a passing acquaintance with Dutch literature or with the kinds of images used in illustrated books (above all emblem books) will know how much less pervasive was the habit of investing ordinary objects than of investing scenes with meaning that go be-y ond their surface and outward appearance. In the mid-1960s, Eddy de Jongh published an extraordinary array of material — especially from the emblem books and vernacular literature — that confirmed the unreliability of taking Dutch pictures at surface value alone.

The major difficulty, however, with the findings of critics such as de Jongh is that it is not easy to assess the multiplicity of levels in which Dutch viewers interpreted these pictures. De Jongh’s followers typically regard the pictures as purely symbolic. Not every object within Dutch paintings need be interpreted in terms of the gloss given to its equivalent representation in the emblem books. Not every foot warmer is to be interpreted in terms of the foot warmer in Rowmer Visscher’s Sinnepoppen of 1614, not every bridle is an emblem of restraint (though many were indeed just that).

To maintain as Brown does, that the two children in Netscher’s painting A Lady Teaching a Child to Read stand for industry and idleness is to fail to understand that the painting has a variety of possible meanings, even though the picture undoubtedly carriers unmistakable symbolic meanings, too. Modern Art historians may well find the discovery of parallels be-tween a painting and a specific emblem exciting, they may, like seventeenth-century viewers, search for the double that lie behind many paintings. But seventeenth-century response can hardly be reduced to the level of formula. To suggest otherwise is to imply a laboriousness of mental process that may well characterize modern interpretations of seventeenth-century Dutch Art, but that was, for the most part, not characteristic in the seventeenth century.

He is better at words. She is better at sentences. Games they like to play involve the former, and he wins the vast majority of them the vast majority of the time. Debates they find themselves in involve the latter, and there hasn’t been an occasion (on record) of him winning one for many, many years.

Crosswords, Scrabble, that new game with green and yellow squares, he excels at. Given six tries to guess a five-letter word, he is quicker to recall words without real vowels (she doesn’t support the idea that “Y” is a vowel), and he has the nerve to guess words with triple letters, like “fluff,” on the second try. Of course, she knows what fluff is. It’s either ________ or the stuffing that comes out of cheap toys. But it’s not a word she would have guessed.

In defense of “Y” ‘s vowelness, he asks, What about “lynx”?

Lynx? she replies, incredulous. When have you ever used that aloud? Oh, look, over there, that lynx is about to pounce and ________ out my heart! She is certain that any per-son in such a scenario would use the word “bobcat.”

What most infuriates her is the presumption that she must be a whiz at words given her ________ as a writer of books. She is gifted calendar crossword puzzles (yes, three hundred and sixty-five tiny crosswords, one sheet for each day) every December, and is often dragged into long bouts of Words with Friends. In one game, he scores more than seventy points with a well-placed “Q.” She loses that game soon enough and texts him, You’re always doing stuff like that,________ the value of each word. But that’s how you play—those are the rules, he replies. She calls into question these rules: is the point system for letters really based on frequency, or is it some larger institutional ________ of mind control? He repeats, but those are the rules. On her darkest of writing days, she takes the last sentence she wrote and ________ it up for points. She is immensely disappointed. Then she stares at those cross-word calendars, and they stare back. The five she was gifted this holiday season, plus several from last year. They sit all over her desk like blind cats. Hundreds if not thousands of empty ________.

She often finds herself ________ whether her writing skills actually translate to success in games that demand lexical agility. Despite her ________ , she finds these games frustrating and ________. It’s not just about knowing words, she thinks, but about using them ________. Her brother, on the other hand, seems to ________ these nuances naturally, picking the perfect moments to drop his triple-letter bombs.

One evening, she decides to challenge him to a game of ________, determined to prove that her skills can extend beyond the page. The game starts off well for her, with each player trading clever, high-scoring words. But soon, he begins to pull ahead,________ advantage of every double word score space, while she struggles to make the most of her ________.