I see a lot of Nest complaints, isn't there any security issue if Nest goes down?

My whole house is covered by a Nest Secure alarm system. At the moment my Nest Guard is telling me "it's offline". But if someone breaks in the house, the alarm will still ring in the house, however I believe I won't be notified on my phone (can't even log into the Nest app), and the alarm monitoring center (operated by Brinks under a partnership with Google) probably won't be notified as well, which sucks. I'd love to test it right now, but my daughter is sleeping and I don't want the alarm to wake her up...

I wonder how often outages occur with other alarm monitoring companies. They certainly do occur, but customers don't have a lot of visibility into them.

I see people complain about Nest and the only thing I can think of is "what on earth where you thinking to have a door or thermostat that doesn't function without internet?!"

Nest thermostats can function without Internet. You can walk up to it and adjust the temperature just like any old thermostat.

I live in a house with a Nest thermostat and Nest Secure and Nest x Yale door locks. The AC is on just fine, and the door unlocked just fine. (The door lock doesn't require an internet connection, unless you've enabled privacy mode for some reason.)

I thought there were versions that don't work offline; my bad if this is not the case.

Internet isn't the issue, it's the endpoint (Google)

It's reasonably easy to run a router/gateway that has a 4G backup to get the ping out. Whether the ping works...

Instagram is on GCloud? Facebook has a heavy investment in their own DCs, I thought they would have transitioned to them by now.

No, the graphs are highly misleading because they autoscale the y axis to the highest point and the they do very loose string matching to detect errors.

If you click through to something not on Google cloud, you see moderately elevated error rates (e.g., Instagram is up by 4x) but if you click through to something actually on Google, you see very highly elevated error rates (e.g., roughly 50000x for Snapchat).

If you read the "error reports", they actually report that Instagram isn't down (same for Twitter if you check Twitter). The error report detection seems to be just string matching. Here's an actual "error report" from downdetector that's the caused of allegedly elevated error rates:

> my twitter timeline: why isn’t snapchat working? anyone’s snapchat not working? snapchat’s being dumb. rip snapchat.

The Twitter "error report" is literally a report that Twitter isn't down.

Ah. I was looking at it on phone and it wasn't clear. Thanks for clarifying.

it's no clearer on desktop. that's actually pretty funny that the instagram graph spikes just because people are complaining about snapchat being down.

i always thought downdetector was doing something a bit more clever than just reporting the rate of tweets containing the word "instagram" or "facebook" or something. but apparently not.

Just because you run your own ram and compute doesn’t mean you run your object store, too. Running drives is a commodity now, and crypto is cheap since aes-ni.

No idea if this is what instagram does or not, just in general. Drives are hot and need lots of power and it’s expensive to out-S3 S3.

Object store won't cause Instagram to go down though, no? Assets might fail to load.

What's left of instagram without the assets? And some of the assets required to fully load are probably in object store as well.

Wow. Everyone depends on Google.