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