I was lucky enough to listen to Souders talk at Fluent this past week. He talked about Front-end SPOFs and specifically an experience in Beijing where Business Insider didn't load because of a third party widget (Twitter, in his case) being blocked.

One site he mentioned (and great for testing) was webpagetest.org.

Here are the slides from the talk: http://stevesouders.com/talks.php

He blogged about the issue here: http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/03/28/frontend-spof-in...

Before you deploy, test with facebook.com and twitter.com sent to 0.0.0.0 in your hosts file. Facebook has been getting more reliable, so it's possible to develop a feature and deploy it without Facebook breaking.

That may not be enough. If the browser receives an instant connection error it will continue with the other parts of the page.

You want to link it to a machine that will never reply - or worse will start to reply and then just sit there.

For this purpose, 1.1.1.1 is probably an OK IP to use for testing. It's in a range that's technically a routable public IP, but which will almost certainly never be announced (as it receives a ridiculous amount of bogus traffic).

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Apache/2.2.9 Server at blog.catchpoint.com Port 80

Posting the entire error message was a tongue-in-cheek retort to the article's main point: handling outages.

The 1x1 pixel trick he mentions is a wonderful little hack. Such an elegant solution to keeping your clients' sites working without even requiring site managers' action.

Does anyone know what caused the outage at Facebook?

Developers