I Lost 3 Days Of Data By Not Taking 10 Min. For These Deprecation Steps

How data engineers can anticipate, adapt to and recover from inevitable data downtimes and API outages.

Currently job searching? Give yourself an edge by developing a personal project using my free 5-page project ideation guide.

In March 2024 nearly 3 billion humans, almost half the planet, went through collective information withdrawal as Facebook and Instagram crashed. Facebook’s downtime wasn’t as cinematic as other apps, like Reddit, which have gone completely offline. By still supporting a sign in flow, Facebook teased users into thinking the app was functional and everything was normal. Consequently, users were trapped in a vicious log- in cycle that inevitably resulted in an error message.

Since I don’t work at Meta/Facebook/Instagram, I can only imagine the chaos and speed at which engineers worked to bring Earth’s social network back online before the lunch rush. I can tell you, however, what it feels like to have all your systems at 100%, only to have visibility plunge to 0.

Given a corporation’s resources, robust dev ops teams and increased reliance on cloud infrastructure, it’s highly unlikely anything like this could happen at my work.

Which it didn’t.

My experience stems from a logistic mistake in my personal infrastructure that compelled me to pull the plug on several automated…