this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
419 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37720 readers
657 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As an engineer, this sounds most plausible - they had proactive detection and resolution in place against various attacks and system failures, which got triggered due to the massive drop in public subreddits/users/activity, and made everything worse. Honestly, this isn't a scenario their engineers could have easily predicted...
I'm not sure if it's just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I'm just guessing, because it doesn't make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process...
in a way it does, when you're building massive scale systems. Say you are the mitigation team and want to protect yourself against a malicious hacker/employee that starts shutting down web servers or removes posting permissions from the DB for everyone. You're going to monitor the frequency of posts and if it drop too fast, you know something's bad happening. You're going to take automated measures against it - maybe freeze access to the DB completely, maybe switch to a (much less tested) backup region/system, etc.. so you can see how things can snowball from there to strange scenarios...
yeah, well, maybe...
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right