A trivial routine update gone wrong, not a hacker attack, it would be at the root of everything

Facebook spiega il perché del lungo blackout di ieri (aggiornato: ulteriori info)

Nicola Ligas

Nicola Ligas

All services of Facebook , included then WhatsApp and Instagram , They were unreachable for about 6 hours yesterday, and after the many hypotheses initially formulated, the ‘company now try to give a brief official explanation.

Facebook states that the long disruption was caused by a configuration change of its routers which ended badly, causing a BGP error (the protocol used to connect multiple routers) that propagated in a chain isolating them de facto one from the other and thus bringing all the company’s services to the collapse.

Mark Zuckerberg himself issued a personal apology (in addition to having lost about $ 6 billion within a few ore), promising to learn from q u so successful to make the whole infrastructure more resilient .

It would not have been a hacker attack , as some feared given the continuation of the interruption.

Update 06/10/2021

Facebook has published a new post with further technical explanations on what happened. The origin of everything was a command given during normal maintenance which caused the shutdown of the backbone which connects all Facebook data centers around the world. This was the trigger, the talk about DNS is secondary: they continued to work but aimed at an unreachable service.

Even once Facebook technicians then intervened, the security protocols in progress have slowed down their work. And once the backbone was brought back online, it was not possible to bring everything back online in a flash, otherwise there would have been an absurd power spike that could have caused further damage. Things were therefore done with a minimum of “calm”, in accordance with the exercises carried out previously, which they had prepared for events similar to this one, but unfortunately there are precisely some technical times that could not be shortened.

It seems trivial, but let’s talk about data centers that consume tens of megawatts each and a backbone consisting of tens of thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cables that cross the world: although the disservice was serious, before doing further damage, prudence was a must.

And that’s it: no hacker attacks, no conspiracies. Unless you think it’s all a conspiracy, of course.