Seems reasonable that at a company of 60k, with hundreds who specialize in PR, you do not want a random engineer making the choice himself to be the first to talk to the press by giving a PR conference on a random forum.

Honestly, from a PR perspective, I’m not sure it’s so bad. Giving honest updates showing Facebook hard at work is certainly better PR for our kind of crowd than whatever actual Facebook PR is doing.

That one guy's comments seen fine from a PR perspective apart from it not being his role to communicate for the company.

I still think he should be fired for this kind of communication though. One reason is, imagine Facebook didn't punish breaches of this type. Every other employee is going to be thinking "Cool, I could be in a Wired article" or whatever. All they have to do is give sensitive company information to reporters.

Either you take corporate confidentiality seriously or you don't. Posting details of a crisis in progress on your Reddit account is not taking corporate confidentiality seriously. If the Facebook corporation lightly punishes, scolds, or ignores this person then the corporation isn't taking confidentiality seriously either.

I agree, but try to explain that to PR people...

It's terrible PR for the FB PR team's performance.

Reporters are going to opportunistically start writing about those comments vs having to wait for a controlled message from a communications team. So the reddit posts might not be "so bad", but they're also early and preempting any narrative they may want to control.

You falsely assume Hacker News is even remotely what Facebook PR gives a shit about.

That was their best PR in years

Compare Facebook's official tweet: "We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

That's the PR team, clueless.

I don't think Facebook could actually say anything more accurate or more honest. "Everything is dead, we are unable to recover, and we are violently ashamed" would be a more fun statement, but not a more useful one.

There will be plenty of time to blame someone, share technical lessons, fire a few departments, attempt to convince the public it won't happen again, and so on.

I agree completely. The target audience Facebook is concerned about is not techies wanting to know the technical issues. Its the huge advertising firms, governments, power users, etc. who have concerns about the platform or have millions of dollars tied up in it. A bland statement is probably the best here - and even if the one engineer gave accurate useful info I don't see how you'd want to encourage an org in which thousands of people feel the need to post about whats going on internally during every crisis.

Well, they could at least be specific about how large the outage is. "Some people" is quite different to absolutely everyone. At least they did not add a "might" in there.

Facebook has never been open and honest about anything, no reason to think they would start now.

To be fair, Facebook has never been open and honest about anything.

Facebook is well known for having really good PR, if they go after this guy for sharing such basic info that's yet another example of their great PR teams.

These few sentences were a better and more meaningful read than what hundreds of PR people could ever come up with

A few random guesses (I am not in any way affiliated with FB); just my 2c:

Sharing status of an active event may complicate recovery, especially if they suspect adversarial actions: such public real-time reports can explain to the red team what the blue team is doing and, especially important, what the blue team is unable to do at the moment.

Potentially exposing the dirty laundry. While a postmortem should be done within the company (and as much as possible is published publicly) after the event, such early blurbs may expose many non-public things, usually unrelated to the issue.

Mentioned in another reply

Shareholders and other business leaders I'm sure are much happier reporting this as a series of unfortunate technical failures (which I'm sure is part of it) rather than a company-wide organizational failure. The fact they can't physically badge in the people who know the router configuration speaks to an organization that hasn't actually thought through all its failure modes. People aren't going to like that. It's not uncommon to have the datacenter techs with access and the actual software folks restricted, but that being the reason one of the most popular services in the world has been down for nearly 3 hours now will raise a lot of questions.

I did not read it as they can't get them on site but rather that it takes travel to get them on site. Travel takes time of which they desperately want not to spend.

> If I was in charge I'd give them a modest EOY bonus for being helpful in their outreach to my users in the wider community.

That seems pretty unlikely at any but the smallest of companies. Most companies unify all external communications through some kind of PR department. In those cases usually employees are expressly prohibited from making any public comments about the company without approval.

> What are they afraid of?

Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Hours as Facebook Plunges

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-loses-7-billion-ho...

Stop the hemorrhaging. Too much bad press for FB lately and it all adds up.

Unrelated to the outage, but I hate headlines like this.

Facebook is down ~5% today. That's a huge plunge to be sure, but Zuckerberg hasn't "lost" anything. He owns the same number of shares today as he did yesterday. And in all likelihood, unless something truly catastrophic happens the share price will bounce back fairly quickly. The only reason he even appears to have lost $7 billion is because he owns so much Facebook stock.

These types of alarmist headlines are inane.

Unlikely to be related. FB's losses today already happened before FB went down, and are most likely related to the general negative sentiment in the market today, and the whistleblower documents. It's actually kind of remarkable how little impact the outage had on the stock.

There was no permanent damage to Facebook as a result of the outage so it's understandable that the stock price wasn't really affected by it

I was thinking the same...

As much as all of the curious techies here would love transparency into the problem, that doesn't actually do any good for Facebook (or anyone else) at the moment. Once everything is back online, making a full RCA available would do actual good for everyone. But I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

FB takes confidentiality very seriously. He crossed a major red line.

They got told, explicitly that they shouldn't be sharing updates from the outage meeting, in the outage meeting.

Do we even know if someone had the account deleted? I think facebook might have their hands full right now solving the issue rather than looking at social media posts that discusses the issue.

There are a lot of people who work at Facebook, and I'm sure the people responsible for policing external comms do not have the skills or access to fix what's wrong right now.

Assuming that Facebook forced the account to be deleted, it wouldn't have been done by anyone who's working on fixing the problem.