Did they try switching it off and on again?
Mark Zuckerberg’s empire crumbled on Monday (October 4) night as his biggest platforms crashed completely for around seven consecutive hours. Though rumours of hacks and the apocalypse quickly started stirring, what actually happened?
Though Facebook has not yet confirmed the exact cause of the collapse, those who actually understand technology are starting to put forward their own theories.
Numerous outlets are reporting that the Domain Name System (DNS) was the root of the issue – but DNS errors are usually fairly straightforward to fix, which could point to a bigger issue, reports Wired.
“Facebook’s outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that’s a just symptom of the problem,” says Troy Mursch, Chief Research Officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets.
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.
— Meta (@Meta) October 4, 2021
Mursch and other experts believe that Facebook’s withdrawal from the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) route that contains DNS IP addresses is actually the cause of the black-out.
In layman’s terms, BGP is the internet’s motorway and as seen with the recent Insulate Britain protests, when motorways go down, we all go down. The internet is no different.
Basically, Facebook and its sister platforms got lost on the internet.
Twitter right now as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crash #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/zSHya9uxC0
— . (@n0sanity_) October 4, 2021
“It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” says John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.
Explaining the black-out, Facebook said: “Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication.
“This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”
Related links:
- Facebook and Twitter provide police with details of racists who abused England footballers
- Facebook shuts down accounts linked to mystery Russian agency in anti-vaccine influencer campaign
- Trump reportedly to sue Facebook and Twitter CEOs for everyone ‘cancelled’ by social media
