Ep. 34: Facebook Outage Analysis; Plus, Why Cross-Layer Visibility Is a Must for App Experience

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. We’re back from a short sabbatical to cover an interesting outage at Facebook in what appears to be an application outage compounded by a series of routing issues. On April 8th, for roughly 40 minutes, the Facebook application became unavailable for users around the globe who were attempting to connect to the service. Despite the short-lived nature of the outage, we observed prolonged performance degradation even after the application came back online for users. Suboptimal page load and response times, both of which can impact the user experience, were observed alongside a series of routing changes. This outage reminds us all of the importance of having visibility across network and application layers when troubleshooting and prioritizing issues that are impacting user experience. Catch this week’s episode to hear about the outage from ThousandEyes perspective.