Why did Hundreds of millions of people were unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp for more than six hours on Monday, underscoring the world’s reliance on platforms owned by the Silicon Valley giant.
But what actually caused the failure?
What does Facebook say happened?
In an apologetic blog post, Santosh Janardhan, Facebook’s vice president of infrastructure, said that “configuration changes on the core routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.”
Facebook said Tuesday that the outage was “not caused by malicious activity, but by an error on our part.”
Can you explain this in simple English?
Cyber experts believe the problem comes down to something called BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, the system the internet uses to choose the fastest route to move packets of information.
Sami Slim of data center company Telehouse compared BGP to “the Internet equivalent of air traffic control.”
In the same way that air traffic controllers sometimes change flight schedules, “Facebook has made an update to these routes,” Slim said.
But this update contained a crucial error.
It’s not yet clear how or why, but Facebook’s routers essentially sent a message to the internet that the company’s servers no longer existed.
Why did it take so long to solve the problem?
Experts say Facebook’s technical infrastructure is Cayman Islands WhatsApp Number Lists unusually reliant on its own systems, which proved disastrous on Monday.
After Facebook sent out the fateful routing update, its engineers were locked out of the system, which would allow them to communicate that the update was actually a bug. So they were unable to fix the problem.
“Normally, it is good not to put all your eggs in one basket,” says Pierre Bonis of AFNIC, the association that manages domain names in France.
“For security reasons, Facebook has had to concentrate its infrastructure very heavily,” he said.
“It makes things easier on a day-to-day basis, but because everything is in one place. When that place has a problem, nothing works.”
The ripple effects of the shutdown included some Facebook employees not even being able to enter their buildings because their security badges no longer worked, further slowing the response.
Is this unprecedented?
Social media outages are not uncommon: Instagram WhatsApp Number Database alone has experienced more than 80 in the past year in the United States, according to website builder Tool Tester.
However, this week’s Facebook outage was rare in its duration and scale.
There is also precedent for BGP interference causing a social media shutdown.
In 2008, when a Pakistani internet service provider attempted to block YouTube for domestic users. It inadvertently shut down the global website for several hours.
And the impact of the breakdown?
Between Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. “Billions of users have been impact by the services being completely offline,” tracking service Down detector said.
Facebook, whose shares fell nearly 5% during the outage. Stress that there was “no evidence that user data was compromise as a result of this outage.”
But even though it only lasted a few hours, the impact of the shutdown was profound.
Facebook’s services are crucial to many businesses Bulk Database around the world, and users have complain of being cut off from their livelihoods.
Facebook accounts are also commonly used to log into other websites. Which have faced additional problems due to the company’s technical collapse.
Rival instant messaging services, meanwhile, said they had taken advantage of the fact that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were down.
Telegram jumped from the 56th most downloaded free app in the US to fifth. According to monitoring firm SensorTower, while Signal tweeted that “millions” of new users had joined.
And among the more curious side effects, several domain name registration companies have indicated that Facebook.com is available for purchase.
